Re: FrontPage creates Unicode Web pages

Chris Pratley, from Microsoft, has given me permission to quote his 
reply to my mail re FrontPage and Unicode Web pages.

After the 8th Unicode Conference (Hong Kong, April 1996), I thought 
1996 would be the year of Unicode on the Web.  It looks like it'll 
really happen in 1997.  Something to look forward to.

Misha

---

Hi there.  You may remember that I presented at the 9th Unicode
Conference on the topic of making Microsoft Word and Office Unicode
based (XL and Powerpoint are too).

One of the features of Word97 is that it authors HTML (as a WYSIWYG
editor, and also HTML text editing), and of course we also author UTF-8.
If you install the multlilingual support (available on all versions of
Win95 and NT4), and have input methods for Asian languages (we supply
fonts for Pan-Euro, CE, Asian), you can enter any European or Asian
language text into your web page using Word97 and save it as UTF-8.
Arabic and Hebrew may also work, but I haven't investigated yet if the
US version of the OS will let us display them well. Certainly these
languages laid out in US Word97 will not look pretty, but the HTML, when
displayed on the right browser, should look OK.

Anyway, with all the hoopla about FrontPage, I thought I'd let you know
there is at least another major MS app coming along in about 2 months
that authors UTF-8, and we don't have any of the problems listed below
(i.e. we display everything fine). We also use the META tag.

Cheers,
Chris

Received on Thursday, 7 November 1996 15:12:53 UTC