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 TechnicalTalk » Graphics and Web Design » HTML/XHTML/DHTML & CSS
 Unicode vs Western

[Wally]

Wally  

 Unicode vs Western

I just ran into a problem today.  The pages that we nomally design (to be viewed locally only) use a Western character set.  However, the new page I set up today uses a Unicode charater set.  The problem is the " and ' characters are now displaying as boxes or question marks on the pages.  How do I get them to display correctly without switching back from Unicode?

[Admin]

Admin  

 Re: Unicode vs Western

Have you tried setting the unicode character for the page where you want to show unicode characters?

In the meta tags you can very well define the characher set for a page.

For e.g.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />


Hope this helps you.

[Wally]

Wally  

 Re: Unicode vs Western

Setting the meta tags to to "charset=iso-8859-1" does fix the problem.  But how do pages using "charset=utf-8" get around this issue?

On a related note, is unicode "more compatible" for a global distribution than a western character set?

[Andrew09]

Andrew09  

 Re: Unicode vs Western

However, since all operating systems for home computers available today are Unicode based, and since two-thirds or more of HTML editors support Unicode, I don't see much gain in choosing to use a legacy 8-bit character set. It doesn’t give you anything that Unicode doesn’t give.

Some sets do use less bytes to produce the same number of characters. But that is hardly true of ISO-8859-1, unless you are using a very, very large number of extended characters, accented characters and pound currency signs and yen signs and so forth.

[mallory]

mallory  

 Re: Unicode vs Western

The advantages of depend very much on the language your web page is in.

Very few people, of example, would create a Japanese, or Devanagari, or even a Turkish web page in ISO-8859-1, using HTML character entities fo cover any characters not in ISO-8859-1.

If you are, however, creating a web page in English or French or another western language, it probably won’t matter much which one you use.

However, since all operating systems for home computers available today are Unicode based, and since two-thirds or more of HTML editors support Unicode, I don't see much gain in choosing to use a legacy 8-bit character set. It doesn’t give you anything that Unicode doesn’t give.

Some sets do use less bytes to produce the same number of characters. But that is hardly true of ISO-8859-1, unless you are using a very, very large number of extended characters, accented characters and pound currency signs and yen signs and so forth.