Re: language_names

["James A. Treacy" <treacy@debian.org>]

Thanks for this useful information.

Since most people won't have fonts installed to handle characters in
other charsets, this won't buy us much for now. We should still
make the change because it will prepare us for the future and
because it is the Right Thing.

On Fri, Jan 07, 2000 at 12:06:17AM +0900, Yoshizumi Endo wrote:
> As you know, some language_names at the bottom of each pages are
> broken for conflict of character set.  I think that to use "character
> entity references" is an adequate solution to avoid this problem.
> 
>   "Character entity references in HTML 4.0"
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/sgml/entities.html
> 
> For example:
> 
>   Español  -> Español
>   Româná   -> Românã
>   français -> français
> 
All the language names in english/template/debian/language_names.wml
should be converted to this form. BTW, someones editor keeps changing
certain characters. For example ¼ is converted to 1/4. Using
character entity references should stop this problem.

> Also, "character entity references" can handle multibyte-characters
> with ISO10646 code set.
> 
>   Japanese (Chinese characters) -> 日本語
>   Chinese  (Chinese characters) -> 中文
> 
> I've committed new Japanese language_name with the "character entity
> references".  Then, if you have modern web browser (ex. mozilla M12 or
> IE5) and appropriate font-sets, you can read Japanese language_name at
> the bottom of the English top page.
> 
One thing that confuses me (which may simply be a symptom of a
greater misunderstanding): will this work when the translations are
encoded using their native charset, e.g. iso-8859-1? My impression was
that the pages would need to be encoded entirely in something like
ISO10646 for this to work.

-- 
James (Jay) Treacy
treacy@debian.org