Re: MINUTES: GEO telecon 20031009

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Tex Texin wrote:

> Would it be possible to get some notes on the BBC W.S. concerns and interests?
> If not for the list, via private mail... As an advanced international user I
> presume it would be indicative of some of the larger problems that need to be
> tackled.

  I'm interested in that, too. It's laudable that they use UTF-8 for WS
pages, but that seems to be about as far as they go in terms of I18N and
standard compliance.  I've just found that even that is only the case
of scripts for which there's no widely supported legacy encoding. Their
Chinese pages are in GB2312. Well, I can't blame them for using GB2312
for Chinese and Windows-1251 for Russian, but I'm now even less
'impressed' by the degree of I18N at BBC WS pages.

  A couple of times, I wrote to BBC that they need to specify the language
with 'lang' (or 'xml:lang') for their WS pages, but I have yet to hear
back, let alone seeing it get fixed.

  Web pages of other news media are hardly better than BBC. For
instance, NYTimes.com uses Windows-1252, but most of their pages are not
tagged at all (or use a broken construct like 'meta http-equiv="charset"
content="iso-8859-1"' [1]) so that I almost always have to manually set the
encoding (because my default is not Windows-1252). I'm wondering if
we can (GEO) do something about this (contacting web masters of those
sites wearing a kind of 'official' hat).


  Jungshik

[1] Yes, they claim that their pages are in 'iso-8859-1' although they're
actually in Windows-1252. Most browsers can cope with this kind of
mistagging (ISO-8859-1 < Windows-1252, EUC-KR < x-Windows-949, TIS620 <
ISO-8859-11 < x-Windows-874, GB2312 < GBK < GB18030) having seen so many
of them, but I wonder where they picked up the idea of a separate meta
tag declaration for 'charset'.

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 21:53:41 UTC