Re: [tlug] Big5 Vs. Unicode Vs. Netscape 4.x Vs. deadline

[Edward Middleton <edwardmiddleton@example.com>]

On Wed, 2003-05-07 at 02:42, Katsuhiko Momoi wrote:
> Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> 
> > Let me present you with a hypothetical situation.
> >
> > I disavow any association with it except for having
> > recently hypothetically stepped into a sort of hypothetical
> > rescue-kibitzer role.
> >
> > A company developed a database-backed intranet for a certain
> > other, large company's office in a rather prosperous part of
> > China.  The initial development was in English and now a Chinese
> > translation is being done.  The programmer working on this
> > created the Chinese-language entries in the database in Unicode.
> >
> > Today, she learned some interesting facts:
> >
> > 1) Netscape 4 doesn't support Unicode; 
> 
> This is not true. Netscape 4 does support Unicode. However, the font 
> assignment is not automatic as on IE5/6. On Netscape 6.x and later, font 
> assignment is automatic and users can expect Unicode display to work 
> without any tinkering. Could it be that font setting might be the 
> primary cause of the problem? In that case, you can this page I wrote:
> 
> http://wp.netscape.com/eng/intl/basics.html#setup
> 
> You can choose "Unicode" as the encoding and then assign a Chinese font 
> in case the primary need is to display Chinese characters (Simplified or 
> Traditional as the case might be).
> 
> There might be some bugs in NS 4.x support of Unicode, and it that case, 
> there might be a way to work around it. More info is appreciated.

If you don't control which browser don't kid yourself about Unicode
support, most people don't use it and it only really works on newer
browsers.  Localized browsers are the norm, and if they are mostly using
NS 4.x a local character set (Big5) will be your best option.

I think you would be much better to convert at the end.  How good is
Java support for Big5 encoded databases.  Remembering that the Java
internally uses Unicode.  I suspect that converting on the fly will be 
much simpler as your can do it right at the end and not have to worry
about encoding issues in most of the application.

You need to be careful about specifying the correct encoding in the HTTP
header and HTML file.  Most people realize the importance of meta
encoding tags but ignore the HTTP header which if inappropriately set
can cause lots of problems.

-- 
Edward Middleton <edwardmiddleton@example.com>