Website page character sets (was Re: Japanese Translation of SVNBook Top page)

Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz gradha at titanium.sabren.com
Wed Feb 22 15:32:01 CST 2006


On 2006-02-22, "C. Michael Pilato" <cmpilato at red-bean.com> wrote:
> index.en.html claims in a <META> tag that its contents are
> iso-8859-1.  But of course, that character set don' say nuttin'
> 'bout no Unicode CJK characters.  (This apparently hasn't prevented
> the file from growing some Chinese Unicode characters already,
> though.)  At any rate, I think that UTF-8 should be the claimed
> character set.  Right?

You are confusing file encoding (meta tag) with content (<html
lang="xx">). Please don't mix them.

> When I got to the index.it.html file, it didn't have the same
> Chinese glyphs in it that the English page did, but instead
> had the English word "Chinese".  I'm guessing that's because
> someone realized there than the Chinese glyphs wouldn't "fit"
> in the iso-8859-1 page.

No, it's because whoever added the link commited a terrible
mistake. In fact, dmitry managed to break the spelling for the
Spanish language in r1567, even if he didn't mean to.

> I'm going to switch the English page to UTF-8 now.  I'd encourage
> other translation owners to do the same for their sites so that all
> the site pages have full access to the glyphs needed to describe
> the other translation languages.

And here a third different thing: a gliph is a term related
to graphical output, which has nothing to do with HTML or its
encoding. A glyph is something important only to a browser rendering
a page. You can change HTML encoding as much as you want, the glyph
will stay the same as long as you don't change the 7bit safe HTML
escape sequence &#decimal used for say Russian or Japanese.

I would rather encourage the respective translators to learn a
little bit about web page internationalisation, and at least apply
the following patch, which corrects the glaring mistakes (though
it doesn't update the content of the outdated pages).
-------------- next part --------------
Index: index.pt_BR.html
===================================================================
--- index.pt_BR.html	(revision 2014)
+++ index.pt_BR.html	(working copy)
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
 <html lang="pt-BR">
 <head>
-<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
 <title>Controle de Versão com Subversion</title>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="./styles.css" type="text/css">
 </head>
Index: index.it.html
===================================================================
--- index.it.html	(revision 2014)
+++ index.it.html	(working copy)
@@ -165,9 +165,9 @@
    <a href="index.nb.html" title="norsk" 
       hreflang="nb" lang="nb" rel="alternate">norsk</a> |
    <a href="index.ru.html" title="Russian"
-      hreflang="ru" lang="ru" rel="alternate">Russian</a> |
+      hreflang="ru" lang="ru" rel="alternate">Русский</a> |
    <a href="index.zh.html" title="Chinese"
-      hreflang="zh" lang="zh" rel="alternate">Chinese</a>
+      hreflang="zh" lang="zh" rel="alternate">中文</a>
 </p>
 
 </td>
Index: index.zh.html
===================================================================
--- index.zh.html	(revision 2014)
+++ index.zh.html	(working copy)
@@ -148,7 +148,7 @@
    <a href="index.nb.html" title="norsk" 
       hreflang="nb" lang="nb" rel="alternate">norsk</a> |
    <a href="index.ru.html" title="Russian"
-      hreflang="ru" lang="ru" rel="alternate">Russian</a> 
+      hreflang="ru" lang="ru" rel="alternate">Русский</a>
 </p>
 
 </td>
Index: index.ru.html
===================================================================
--- index.ru.html	(revision 2014)
+++ index.ru.html	(working copy)
@@ -175,7 +175,7 @@
    <a href="index.nb.html" title="norsk"
       hreflang="nb" lang="nb" rel="alternate">norsk</a> |
    <a href="index.zh.html" title="Китайский"
-      hreflang="zh" lang="zh" rel="alternate">Chinese</a>
+      hreflang="zh" lang="zh" rel="alternate">中文</a>
 </p>
 
 </td>


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