Re: [tlug] Re: font/char set question

[Darren Cook <darren@example.com>]

> In fact, for DoCoMo you have that backwards. They will handle UTF-8
> e-mail just fine, but will not handle anything but Shift_JIS for web
> pages.
> 
> AU and Softbank support both Shift_JIS and UTF-8 for e-mail and web
> pages.

Thanks, that is what I suspected, but ...

> There may be certain models of phone for which the above is not true,
> but in general, conversion seems to be done at the gateway.

...it is that doubt that keeps Amazon using Shift-JIS. Though if they
are actually doing the conversion at the gateway, surely there is not
room for doubt? Or do more modern phones use a different gateway?

> Here is the method I've developed over the past seven years or so for
> dealing with I18N on web sites.
> ...

You are doing better than me; it is only the past 3 years or so I've
been able to convince Japanese clients that we can do the whole web site
in UTF-8, with a bit of PHP configuration in front of the mobile site to
output it as Shift-JIS.

The biggest problem I've so far had with "everything in UTF-8" is when a
client exports our database into Shift-JIS to use in a legacy (address
label printing) system. It is not so much people inputting Chinese, or
European accents, the problem was question marks appeared in addresses
and the P.O. couldn't deliver. It turns out there are many more kinds of
hyphens in UTF-8 than in Shift-JIS, and so people end up using them.

So now my forms collect data in UTF-8, convert the known problem hyphen
characters, then convert to Shift-JIS, then convert back to UTF-8, and
if the start and end string are not the same I give the user an error
message and tell them not to use weird characters.

Yet, still it is worth using UTF-8: when that client want to invade
China they'll find they can re-use their DB and most of their code, and
only the legacy Shift-JIS code needs rewriting.

Darren


-- 
Darren Cook
http://dcook.org/mlsn/ (English-Japanese-German-Chinese free dictionary)
http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work)
http://dcook.org/work/charts/  (My flash charting demos)