Topic: I don't know Greek!

I was wondering if it's safe to use Greek on webpages as the HTML entities or put them on as images.

Generally when running another language it will be up to the user to have the appropriate language pack installed to render the language correctly. If someone is looking to read the page in Greek they probably have the correct pack installed and you should be fine.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

The site in question just has a few greek words and a bucketload of english. It's a bible study site that get's into a few greek words.

i guess it depends on where the greek words are going to be but it would probably be best to have them as images.

you could always do the "ye ol' hide words in a span" trick.

Later,

C:\

honestly, with the current state of the webbrowsers, and if you have specified the right encoding, a few green letter's shouldn't
do no harm. Search the wiki for 'encoding' and you'll find some good hints on what you need to define.

edit: never mind - apperantly the asylum is not unicode save.

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 12-21-2005 08:51)

There's a right way and a wrong way, the W3C and WCAG has it's own advice on this, if the Greek is only used as quotes inside your English webpage then you should use spans with the lang attribute around your Greek text see teh WCAG Guideline on Language here.

I reacently developed a site that had to have translations for Greek, Czech, Turkish, and Polish. the special characters wouldn't display until I made sure the html fiels were saved as UTF-8, this I only managed to do using Notepad, Notepad has a selector for file encoding when you use save as.

If you have more questions, get in touch.

Cheers,

UTF-8 should do you fine.

Ah I found hits old article on Mezzoblue it's about using foreign languages.

Cheers,

So I should be safe with HTML entities?

HTML/XHTML entity references are only safe in text/html documents. For application/xml or applicaiton/xhtml+xml you can only rely on user agents supporting the XML subset of entity references (< > ' " &). Entering UTF-8 characters directly into the document is pretty safe as long as you both properly send the charset parameter of the Content-Type, and use it in meta tags (HTML) or the XML prolog (XHTML).The absolutely best support for non-latin characters you'll find in character references though. These use the decimal or hexadecimal code point values for the characters in the Unicode standard.


One thing you should be aware of is that there are some problems with the BOM (Byte Order Mark) and both old user agents and server side platforms. Notepad automatically adds the byte order mark to UTF-8 files. (That's the way it recognises them as unicode...) If you find yourself having any odd leading characters in your documents, or the non-latin characters replaced with junk, or execution problems on the server, that might be because of the byte order mark not being supported by the software (user agent or server environment).

--
var Liorean = {
abode: "http://liorean.web-graphics.com/",
profile: "http://codingforums.com/member.php?u=5798"};

(Edited by liorean on 12-22-2005 01:31)

Ok, I think I understand now. Thanks!