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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 06/16/05 00:24
"GS" <goldstandard@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Why do you use Notepad? There are nice multilingual editors
>> available, with much better features.
>
> Simply because I only had access to a locked-down machine that I
> was unable to install a better editor on. Any suggestions?
I think you should try and find a computer that you have some control
over, if you wish to create Arabic Web pages seriously, or any Web
pages seriously. Ultimately it's a matter of your convenience only, but
still.
> Don't have a URL right now, as I took down the test page due to the
> code being shown.
Umm... the URL would have let us see what the server really sends.
> I use windows-1252 because I have seen in other places where this
> should be used to alert the browsers of incoming text that may have
> many different character variations, including right-to-left.
Pardon? Where? Windows-1252 means Windows Latin 1, which has no Arabic
letters, so either you misunderstood something, or those sites do
something that overrides this error.
> If I want to display English and Arabic on the same page, which
> meta tag will be more appropriate,
This is a whole new question. As a rule, don't mix languages. There are
millions of people who know English but no Arabic, or vice versa. Why
would you throw a foreign language at them? There are some excuses,
most notably a link to an Arabic version of the page in the English
version, or vice versa.
Mixing English and Arabic isn't really much of a problem at the
encoding level, since any encoding that lets you use Arabic letters
lets you use English letters as well. It would be more difficult if you
wanted to combine French and Arabic, for example.
Forget meta tags, at least for now. Select an encoding, and specify it
in HTTP headers. It could be UTF-8, or it could be ISO-8859-6, for
example. Other things being equal, use UTF-8.
> Currently, my Apache webserver is sending
> Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=iso-8859-1. Is this an appropriate
> header for displaying Arabic, etc.?
No, because the ISO-8859-1 repertoire is a subset of the windows-1252
(or "Microsoft ANSI") repertoire and thus does not contain any Arabic
letters. The server should be configured to send e.g.
Content-Type:·text/html; charset=utf-8
if your files are UTF-8 encoded. If you cannot do that, check if you
can make the server send _no_ charset parameter in that header; _then_
you can effectively specify the encoding in a meta tag. If you cannot
do even that, i.e. the server persistently claims that everything is
ISO-8859-1, then your only option (apart from getting a better server)
for writing Arabic pages is to write all Arabic characters using
character references, like ا. It's possible, but awkward, at
least if you no nice tool that lets you write normal Arabic and then
converts it to a format with character references.
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html
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