RE: International business communications and Unicode

At 05:40 PM 8/23/01 +0100, Eric Jarvis wrote:
>
>this is the Unicode dream and maybe one day we'll see something like
>it...the actual process at present goes like this...you upload your
>lovely Unicode Japanese site only to find that most Japanese users
>can't access it, they can only access shift-xjis encoded sites...you
>then move on to Russian to discover that most Russian users are
>expecting the language to be encoded with Windows 1251...and don't
>get me on to Chinese
>
>Unicode is utterly wonderful...I love the idea to death...the ethos
>is truly inspiring...the practicality is that Russia, Japan and Hong
>Kong got online before Unicode began...the people of those nations
>will take some shifting from their current methods of representing
>their languages
>


it really depends on who your target audience is. You tailor for your
audience.

In our case, the multilingual sites we're working are all unicode. Our
target audience are accessing the site from MPAWs )Multilingual Public
Access Workstations) located in the public libraries across our state. We
know what browser are being used, and we can specify software/OS
combinations to teh network administrators in each service. THis gives us
the flexibility to do what we need to do.


But the old rule, has always been to design with your target audiences
requirements in hand.



Andj.

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2001 19:24:34 UTC