Subject: Re: Japanese
To: Masao Uebayashi <uebayasi@soum.co.jp>
From: Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 11/26/2000 21:04:16
On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Masao Uebayashi wrote:
> > It does, if you tell it. Though my I18N work at blink.com (our
> > website is fully English-Japanese bilingual), I've discovered, much
> > to my pain, that a *lot* of Japanese folks out there don't bother
> > to label the character set that their web page is using. This isn't
> > so bad in Japan perhaps, where most people have their browsers'
> > encoding set to `Japanese auto-detect,' but for those of us who
> > also need ISO-8859-1 regularly (for French, in my case), it's a
> > real pain.
>
> Isn't it enough to set a 'Content-Type' HTTP header line specifying
> charset, like 'text/html; charset=euc-jp'?
$B$O$$!*(B $B$=$&$G$9!#(B You are correct. Or, better yet (since the Content-type
header can get lost), put the following HTML within the <HEAD></HEAD>
part your web page:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=euc-jp">
(This means you can save the page to a file and reload it, and it
will still work. It also saves having to do anything special with
the web server to get it to know that a particular file is using
a particular encoding.)
But I was just checking out Hotmail to deal with some problems
exchanging e-mail with a friend in Japanese, and upon switching my
account to Japanese language mode, bringing up the `send a message'
screen, and looking at the page source, I found this lovely little
thing:
<meta http-equiv="Context-Type" content="text/html" charset="shift_jis">
If the engineers of a site available in ten different languages,
four of which are Asian (well, nine and three if you count traditional
and simplified Chinese as one) as so crack-laden as to be unable
to spell `Content-type' properly, much less get the rest of the
tag correct, I don't hold out a lot of hope for the future of I18N
on the web.
$B%+!<%H(B
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> 917 532 4208 de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil
She saw that he had singled her out from the three...for no reasoned purpose
of further acquaintance, but in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders
from headquarters, unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last
intention of their lives is to be occupied with the feminine.