Posted by J.O. Aho on 04/09/07 06:40

Simply Confusing! wrote:
> Let me see if I have this any where near *understanding* ...
>
> If I use the iso-8859-1 charset definition, I can only use roman
> alpha-numeric sequences in my code (ie, like regular english/french/german,
> or the unicode &#__; sequence), no problem, correct?

Yes, thats true (HTML entities still depends on the fonts installed on the
client machine supports the characters that you want to display with the HTML
entities).


> If I use BIG5 or GB2312 ... I (should/can/must?) insert the original chinese
> figures into the raw code?

You should type the Chinese in BIG5/GB2312 directly (in the same way as you
would type German in ISO-8859-1), you still can type English (a-zA-Z) in the
CJK encodings.


> If I use UTF-8, I can use either the unicode sequence or the original
> chinese figures.

Not sure what you mean with Unicode, but I suspect you mean HTML entities (
&#XXX; ), UTF-8 is Unicode and you don't need HTML entities as you can
represent all characters in UTF-8 and you still can get trash if you mix
Unicode with HTML entities in UTF-8, depending on how you insert the HTML
entities into the text.


> (ps- looking for simple "what is best answers",
> 10-words-or-less-kind-of-thing, no long treatises or court-cases please :)

Use UTF-8, don't use HTML entities.

--

//Aho

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