Topic awaiting preservation: I'm not Chinese, and in the UK - I need to produce a Chinese website - help?

Ok,

Basically I have a project which requires me to produce a duplicate version of an english site in chinese - I have done some reading and apparently both cantonese and mandarin share the same (or very similar) written language and so should be able to read either - also most if not all chinese people should be able to read the simplified chinese character set (just has less strokes apparently)

Now, I still have a few issues:

1. How are Chinese characters typed on a UK Keyboard? do I have to use a character map and unicode values?

2. How are Chinese characters processed and stored in asp.net and ms-sql?

3. How is a search engine implemented for a chinese site? As I understand it simple pattern matching isn't particularly effective since things can be written different ways depending on context or textual position.

4. Do I have to make a Chinese site read in single character columns from top to bottom, right to left? or is there an accepted web convention for Chinese sites - (I've been to chinese site but since I do not read chinese I'm not sure of the flow of text - also there seems to be very few spaces inbetween words


Any help is much appreciated and I think is probably useful knowledge for most web developers dealing with non-english/european character sets.

Thanks guys,

Jon

SCRWD//MULTIMEDIA PORTAL

Take a look at this:Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers: Some Guidelines
and:
The complete guide to chinese computing
Looks like an interesting project, but don't let i go above your head.
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Support Justice for Pat Richard

(Edited by Rinswind 2th on 07-21-2004 17:24)