tlug: shiver me timbers - Japanese!

[Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>]

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tlug note from Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>
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Hi all,

Let me preface this by saying I have NOT installed the J-E
extensions on my present Slackware set-up: no jserver, never
installed k14.tgz - nothing. So of course, I never bothered to
try reading Nihongo web pages on Linux.

So tonight I was skipping around personal homepages on Harenet
just checking design/layouts and stumbled on a page with the
metatag:<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type"
CONTENT="text/html;CHARSET=x-sjis"> and lo and behold there was
kanji! At first I thought the guy was using gifs to display
Japanese, but I checked the code and nope, it was Japanese.

So, then I thought this has to be some kind of server push so I
saved the page, cleared memory and cache and pulled up the
localhost page - boom, kanji again!

'All right, what's going on here?!' I thought to myself as I
rebooted, started X, started Netscape 3.0 and pulled up my
Japanese homepage. Hah! just as I thought, garbage. No wait,
forgot to switch to Japanese (auto-detect)...I'll be damned,
there's the Japanese!

What IS going on here? How can Netscape display the Japanese
character set when I never installed it? Will Netscape magically
display Cyrillic if I visit the KGB home page? 

Dazed and confused.

Jim S.

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Sent by: Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>
On: 20-Apr-97 at: 21:26:37 JST
http://www1.harenet.or.jp/~schweiz/
Leibowitz's Rule:
When hammering a nail, you will never hit your finger if you
hold the hammer with both hands.
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