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[OT] A question for people with English OS

Harry Kakueki

5/5/2007 3:16:00 PM

Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
without special settings or is it garbled text?
This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
OS so I do not know.

Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?

Harry

--
http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English
22 Answers

John Joyce

5/5/2007 3:53:00 PM

0


On May 6, 2007, at 12:16 AM, Harry Kakueki wrote:

> Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
> without special settings or is it garbled text?
> This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
> OS so I do not know.
>
> Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?
>
> Harry
>
> --
> http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
> A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English
>
Generally, these days the answer is yes. All modern OS's that are
widely used use Unicode natively. Windows XP and Vista, OS X and
Ubuntu all ship with multiple languages supported. They're all
basically language agnostic. Meaning you can switch system languages
as well as browser encodings. Switching the system language may
require logging out/in again or rebooting, depending on the OS.
Japanese is included, including fonts in the standard installations.
The main problem is that browsers do not always catch the encoding.
UTF-8 should be used on all web sites from now on, but many Japanese
sites still encode their content as Shift-JIS or EUC. So it's really
usually the content authors. In theory Shift-JIS should show up fine
if the browser's default encoding is set to UTF-8 but often it is
necessary to manually try different encodings.
One problem is that various fonts may not implement some of the
standard Unicode characters included in the range for Japanese in
Unicode. Also, various browser plugins, such as Flash generally don't
play well with Unicode.
Some sites are also built with older more obscure or platform
specific encodings and 'mojibake' is often all you can get.
Some sites built by individuals using WYSIWYG applications may even
end up with pages containing multiple, conflicting encodings.
It's getting there, but the word on Unicode isn't completely out
there, and not only in Japan. Many application developers world wide
still do not make the effort or even realize they can.
One more point of contention is that different mobile phones in japan
also often use different encodings still, thus perpetuating some of
the trouble. e-mail client apps also are often troublesome with badly
formed xml/xhtml or non-unicode encodings.
Supporting broad amounts of Unicode does have a little more overhead
than the old encodings, but not much.
If you go with UTF-8 for web sites, regardless of the language, you
should be visible to most modern viewers.
see
http://www.u...
for more on it.
or the w3c's site.

Harry Kakueki

5/6/2007 1:01:00 AM

0

On 5/6/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> If you go with UTF-8 for web sites, regardless of the language, you
> should be visible to most modern viewers.
> see
> http://www.u...
> for more on it.
> or the w3c's site.
>
>
Thanks for the information and the link.
I'll be using that. I need to study this topic.

I have no immediate plans to use Japanese text at my web site.
But I have some links to Japanese pages (and plan to add more) and
wanted to know if the visitor could see the Japanese text.
I guess that is out of my control but I wanted to know.


Thank you.

Harry


--
http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English

John Joyce

5/6/2007 4:10:00 AM

0


On May 6, 2007, at 10:01 AM, Harry Kakueki wrote:

> On 5/6/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> If you go with UTF-8 for web sites, regardless of the language, you
>> should be visible to most modern viewers.
>> see
>> http://www.u...
>> for more on it.
>> or the w3c's site.
>>
>>
> Thanks for the information and the link.
> I'll be using that. I need to study this topic.
>
> I have no immediate plans to use Japanese text at my web site.
> But I have some links to Japanese pages (and plan to add more) and
> wanted to know if the visitor could see the Japanese text.
> I guess that is out of my control but I wanted to know.
>
>
> Thank you.
>
> Harry

Sure Harry, no prob.
One thing you can do is view the source of those sites you link to.
That will tell you what encoding is being used. The best thing you
can do is e-mail the webmaster of the site to encourage UTF-8
Like Ruby, it's one of those technologies that spreads slowly at times.

Michal Suchanek

5/7/2007 11:21:00 AM

0

On 05/05/07, Harry Kakueki <list.push@gmail.com> wrote:
> Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
> without special settings or is it garbled text?
> This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
> OS so I do not know.
>
> Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?
>
It is not thing of the past. You need Japanese fonts. Most OSes or
distributions install some but some do not. But this part works in
most cases, and users of obscure distributions are responsible for
their choice I'd guess ;-)

On the other hand, many web page authors fail to specify the encoding
properly. This doesn't matter for English and a few Western languages.
For most languages that use Latin characters the problem is not
critical, the page is still readable. And many browsers would
autodetect the character set given a hint what language you expect.
But this really hurts for Japanese and other non-Latin scripts. Of
course, I do not set up my browser to try and guess what Japanese
encoding would fit the gibberish I received. There are about five
encodings to try, and only one of them shows some readable characters.

So I would guess that about half of the problem are poorly designed web pages.

Of course, when you install a Japanese font and view a page that
specifies the encoding properly the page is *displayed*. You asked
about the ability to *read* the page which requires special skills of
the reader. So in most cases the proper setup does not help much
anyway ;-)

Thanks

Michal

Harry Kakueki

5/7/2007 12:09:00 PM

0

On 5/7/07, Michal Suchanek <hramrach@centrum.cz> wrote:
> On 05/05/07, Harry Kakueki <list.push@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
> > without special settings or is it garbled text?
> > This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
> > OS so I do not know.
> >
> > Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?
> >
> And many browsers would
> autodetect the character set given a hint what language you expect.
> But this really hurts for Japanese and other non-Latin scripts. Of
> course, I do not set up my browser to try and guess what Japanese
> encoding would fit the gibberish I received. There are about five
> encodings to try, and only one of them shows some readable characters.
>
> So I would guess that about half of the problem are poorly designed web pages.
>
> Of course, when you install a Japanese font and view a page that
> specifies the encoding properly the page is *displayed*. You asked
> about the ability to *read* the page which requires special skills of
> the reader. So in most cases the proper setup does not help much
> anyway ;-)
>
> Thanks
>
> Michal
>
>

Thanks for the input.

Would you look at this without changing any settings and tell me if
you see Japanese or gibberish?

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-...

Thank you.

Harry

http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English

John Joyce

5/7/2007 12:50:00 PM

0


On May 7, 2007, at 9:08 PM, Harry Kakueki wrote:

>>
>
> Thanks for the input.
>
> Would you look at this without changing any settings and tell me if
> you see Japanese or gibberish?
>
> http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-...
>
> Thank you.
>
> Harry
>
> http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
> A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English
>
Japanese. But the page itself is created with bad old HTML with
capital letters in the elements.
It contains no DOCTYPE declaration.
Also the page contains no character set encoding declaration.
It's basically up to the user-agent (browser application) in this
case to parse it and guess correctly.
User-agents (mostly browsers) often have a 'quirks mode' where
they're really pretty amazingly good at rendering a badly formed page.
When the doctype and encoding are not specified, your results will
either be something readable or a complete mess, or something in
between.
Fortunately the page itself is simple enough that the problems it has
as an html document are not preventing viewing.

Whoever hosts that site (I've visited it before) should really spend
a few minutes to update the thing.
If you are having trouble viewing it, or others are, the best bet is
to try a different browser.
It works fine in Safari, which is gecko and KHTML based.
it works fine in Firefox as well.
It even works in Opera.

If it works in those, you can't ask for much more.
Older browsers may have more trouble.
But good modern browsers are free so there is no reason to support
ancient (by computer standards) technology.

Michal Suchanek

5/7/2007 2:26:00 PM

0

On 07/05/07, John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On May 7, 2007, at 9:08 PM, Harry Kakueki wrote:
>
> >>
> >
> > Thanks for the input.
> >
> > Would you look at this without changing any settings and tell me if
> > you see Japanese or gibberish?
> >
> > http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-...
> >
> > Thank you.
> >
> > Harry
> >
> > http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
> > A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English
> >
> Japanese. But the page itself is created with bad old HTML with
> capital letters in the elements.
> It contains no DOCTYPE declaration.

Actually I hate they specified small letters for elements and I do not
care about DOCTYPE declarations. XHTML strict is so limited I never
figured out how it could possibly work. It is probably good enough for
such simple pages, but that's not the point I guess.

However, the page probably does also have incorrect colors. It looks
like the background of some parts is specified, but not the body
background nor the text and link color. It renders gray on gray for
me.

> Also the page contains no character set encoding declaration.

It may be sent in the server headers. It probably is because the
encoding is EUC-JP and Firefox would not figure out without a header
somewhere.
It is questionable if server headers or in-page headers are better.
Both have their strengths and limitations.

I have also seen links to that page already. I had no problems except
the colors and the fact it is in language I do not understand ;-)

Thanks

Michal

Roseanne Zhang

5/7/2007 2:48:00 PM

0

Harry Kakueki wrote:
> Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
> without special settings or is it garbled text?
> This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
> OS so I do not know.
>
> Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?
>
> Harry

The user/reader machine needs to install Chinese/Japanese fonts to see
them, otherwise, they would be all question marks. I am currently
working on a machine without those font installed, therefore, I cannot
read any Chinese etc... :(

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-....

Harry Kakueki

5/7/2007 3:00:00 PM

0

On 5/7/07, Roseanne Zhang <roseanne@javaranch.com> wrote:
> Harry Kakueki wrote:
> > Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
> > without special settings or is it garbled text?
> > This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
> > OS so I do not know.
> >
> > Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?
> >
> > Harry
>
> The user/reader machine needs to install Chinese/Japanese fonts to see
> them, otherwise, they would be all question marks. I am currently
> working on a machine without those font installed, therefore, I cannot
> read any Chinese etc... :(
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-....
>
>
Now I am confused.
Some people can see Japanese and some can not.

http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-...

This link shows you question marks?
How about this?

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/nappa_zz...

Thank you.

Harry


--
http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English

Harry Kakueki

5/7/2007 3:22:00 PM

0

On 5/7/07, Roseanne Zhang <roseanne@javaranch.com> wrote:
> Harry Kakueki wrote:
> > Can you view Japanese documents on the internet with an English OS
> > without special settings or is it garbled text?
> > This may seem like a silly question but I have always used a Japanese
> > OS so I do not know.
> >
> > Is it just about the browser? Or is this a thing of the past?
> >
> > Harry
>
> The user/reader machine needs to install Chinese/Japanese fonts to see
> them, otherwise, they would be all question marks. I am currently
> working on a machine without those font installed, therefore, I cannot
> read any Chinese etc... :(
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-....
>
>
OK. I guess I get it.
It's about the fonts. That was pointed out earlier but I missed it.

Thank you.

Harry

--
http://www.kakueki.com/ruby...
A Look into Japanese Ruby List in English