Re: [tlug] Japanese encoding

["Ulrich Plate" <plate@example.com>]

Ryan Shaw wrote:

> I think working with UTF-8 is good. It gets rid of a lot of headaches.
> I wouldn't shy away from it if I were you.

Thanks for the encouragement. :-) I'm not shying away, thinking it would be
particularly appropriate since most forum users will need to be able to
display German and Japanese on a single page. I'm sure I could handle
default layout elements for the web pages to be in UTF-8, but what if people
post messages in Shift-JIS and I try to display them in UTF-8? Anyway, I'll
have to read up some more on this first.

Jim Breen wrote:

> I don't know what the "four little '>'" are, but I guess they are
> in ISO-8859-1?  If so, state that as the code of the page, and the
> autodetect is overridden.

Yes, they are. But if I code the page as iso-8859-x, I cannot have Japanese
on the same page, can I?

> I think it's a wee bit early for pure UTF8 pages to be servicable. I'm
> about to make UTF8 an option on my WWWJDIC server, mainly so that the
> French and German can get displayed mixed with the Japanese without too
> much mucking around. At present I'm putting in é etc.

That's an alternative, but of limited use (only European character sets),
and I'd still have to filter German input and convert it to ü and such.
What if my community grows out of proportion and the Koreans demand their
own forum? :-) No, I'd really love to go the Unicode way, mix Japanese and
Chinese like nobody's business and use IPA characters for phonetics and
all...

Ulrich Plate