Topic awaiting preservation: how to build web sites for Asians / Chinese? (Page 1 of 1)

Wasn't realy sure where this post belongs as it asks a number of questions that fall outisde of this or that forum, so Ozone it is...

I'm completely lost, know nothing at all, when it comes to how Asians, specifically Chinese, even more specifically, Chinese businessmen /entrepeneurs would tend to surf the web.

Would they have a default character encoding for their web browsers that matches their language or would they tend to have English systems and/or character encoding specified?

Does Chinese language travel top to bottom or left ot right? Character encoding take care of such issues? I think not, but ltr and rtl are the only css values available for text directions aren't they?

Anyone know of a good primer on this sort of stuff? All the normal places I'd look for web design advice are completely devoid of this type of material, that is character encoding, demographic info, text direction, and how to make a good site for a Chinese surfer (and anything else I may have forgotten).

I know there used to be some Chinese visitors come through here now and again, hopefully they've learned a lot and are lurking waiting to answer this in an extremely accurate and verbose manner

thanks



(Edited by JKMabry on 07-11-2005 19:50)

Just like English, only with Chinese characters.

(Edited by reisio on 07-11-2005 20:55)

I am not a Chinese speaker, but I do read Chinese (albeit on a rather rudimentary level). I haven't seen our Chinese friends for a while now, so I'll give your question a stab.

1) Character Encoding: the way I see it, either option is possible, but I don't think it really matters which option they choose. They may have a Chinese-language system that has a default Chinese encoding (but will still recognize English), or they may have an English system set up to recognize Chinese. I don't see why this is important, though, as the end result will be the same. Or maybe I'm not understanding what exactly you're asking. That's a very good possiblity, actually.

As far as which actual character sets you would use, well, that depends. There are a lot of different charsets for Chinese (my encoding context menu lists eight different Chinese character sets). Big5 is the standard for traditional Chinese, while Guobiao (GB) is the standard for simplified Chinese. Those two Wikipedia links should give you a basic idea of your options.

The difference between traditional and simplified, by the way (although this is explained in the above links), is where the characters are used. Mainland China has adopted a "simplified" character system, and Singapore has followed suit. Taiwan and Hong Kong still use the traditional (ie, more complex) characters. Korea uses traditional characters as well (in Korea, these characters are called "proper characters," while the simplified characters are called "abbreviated characters"), and Japan uses simplified characters that may or may not be the same as the mainland Chinese characters (I'm pretty sure they're different, even if they are similar, but I'm not positive). Not that you need any of the information in that last sentence, but I thought I'd mention it in case you weren't confused enough yet.

2) Direction: traditionally, Chinese is written top to bottom, right to left (by this I mean that the text starts in the upper right hand corner of the page, travels down to the bottom of the page, then continues at the top of the page to the left of the first character, and so on). On the internet, though, it is written just like most Western languages (ie, left to right, top to bottom). In fact, most modern Chinese texts are written this way (ie, left to right, top to bottom), and the traditional direction is reserved for things like vertical signs and, um, well, that's all I can really think of right now.

From where I stand, it looks like those are you two major questions, right? Character encoding and text direction? Well, hopefully the above should help a bit. In short, though...

quote:

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reisio said:

Just like English, only with Chinese characters.

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Seriously. For all the blabbering I did above, this is what it really comes down to.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

soo... reiso: accurate - Suho: verbose

who could ask for more?! Thanks a ton!

Glad to be of service.

quote:

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JKMabry said:

soo... reiso: accurate - Suho: verbose

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Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, reisio-style.

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Suho, you are a veritable goldmine of information

[sense] Organisation is anathema to organisations [/sense]

Hey, they didn't make me a Mad Librarian for nothing. (which reminds me... I think there are some dishes in the sink that need washing...)

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

http://eserver.org/courses/s01/tc510/adaptivity/cao/cao1.html

Maybe this link could help a bit

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