[nonhuman]

Is it generally a good idea or a bad idea to use unicode on a webpage. I'm trying to make a multi-lingual webpage (with 2 or 3 different writing systems), and I can't think of any other way to do it easily. Unfortunately only Chimera has actually rendered it properly so far. OmniWeb threw a fit and just spit out the raw HTML with some gibberish thrown in, and I'm not sure I even want to see what IE will do with it.

[nonhuman]

Nevermind, problem solved. I really aught to start looking at the standards before starting a project that uses them.

[ism]

Problem solved? What decision did you come to? I decided to use Unicode (UTF-8) on my site and so far haven't had any major problems. Looks ok in ie on windows and mac. And of course mozilla.

Need to learn a bit more about Unicode characters though. Using BBedit works a treat since you just type symbols (such as currency symbols) as normal and then it sorts them out for you. Somehow. Magic,

[nonhuman]

Originally posted by ism:
Problem solved? What decision did you come to? I decided to use Unicode (UTF-8) on my site and so far haven't had any major problems. Looks ok in ie on windows and mac. And of course mozilla.

Need to learn a bit more about Unicode characters though. Using BBedit works a treat since you just type symbols (such as currency symbols) as normal and then it sorts them out for you. Somehow. Magic,

I'm still using Unicode. I was just being really stupid and forgot to specify what the encoding for the page was and apparently non-mozilla browsers don't figure it out on their own.

Does BBEdit handle unicode? Lite doesn't seem to.

[ism]

Ah yes, you do need to include the charset. I normally include it in the xml thingy:

?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?

and in a meta tag:

meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"

Can't remember about BBEdit Lite. But if it includes the same options as the full version it'll be under the 'options' button on the file>'save as' dialog box. There will be check boxes for save as unicode and then save as utf-8 encoding. I normally check these two.

The character palette in OSX should be useful as well as it allows you to enter unicode symbols in any application without having to remember the decimal or hexadecimal codes. e.g:

+∀➡(½➋

(random selction of unicode characters)

Install it from system preferences>International>Input Menu and tick the character palette box.

[nonhuman]

I've just been using the source editor in OmniWeb (it's the only app I've found so far that will save a Unicode document, and then open it again properly). As far as entering the Unicode text, I have the keyboard layouts that I use (Russian, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, and Korean) in my menu already, and I know how to use them, so it's much easier than the character palette. I'll take a closer look at BBEdit though, because using OmniWeb for web authoring just seems wrong...

[ism]

You might find something useful here (as far as text editors go):

www.alanwood.net/unicode/

The page is a little out of date (refers to OSX 10.1), but the editors it mentions should still be available.