Doing a Chinese website - question about encoding

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1

Hi all!

I have been asked to do a site in Chinese.

It will be essentially the same design as the current site my worek uses, but we need a chinese version.

I have coded a chinese flag onto the top right of the design, with the idea that you click on the flag and it will go to the chinese version within a subdirectory…

Is there anything I should be wary of when doing this?

Would I change the Encodiung from Western European to a Chinese format to make it work?

I see there are 4 Chinese encoding types:

Simplified (3)
Traditional

2

I think utf-8 should be fine for both sites.

3

It depends upon which Chinese Language version you are using as CJK languages can be multi-byte so it is also best to state in the markup the language e.g. (lang=“zh-Hans”) too but like Ralph said UTF-8 will probably suffice.

4

Thanks for your replies!

How does this:

<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=utf-8” />

differ from this:

<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=iso-8859-1” />

Both seem to show the Chinese

5

iso-8859-1 is for western European (Latin) languages, whereas utf-8 covers most languages.

However,
<meta http-equiv=“Content-Type” content=“text/html; charset=utf-8” />
normally does not set the Content-Type for your web pages.

The Content-Type is primarily sent to the browser from the server in the http header (I’m not confident that that’s the right terminology). So you need to set the Content-Type being sent out by your server.

You can check the actual encoding of your pages in various ways, such as Tools > Page Info in Firefox.

Here’s a useful reference:

6

Very helpful, thanks

:slight_smile: