發信人: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de (Lee Sau Dan) 日期: 07 Jan 2003 09:49:42 +0100 標題: Re: BIG5 versus Unicode for website development? 信群: alt.chinese.text.big5 看板: 來源: :23673, camaro.informatik.uni-freiburg.de 組織: Rechenzentrum der Universitaet Freiburg, Germany >>>>> "danjourno" == danjourno writes: danjourno> Hi, I am currently trying to build a multilingual site, danjourno> and one of the main languages I will be using is danjourno> Chinese, I am wondering if I should use the Unicode danjourno> character set, or BIG5 for this purpose. That depends on what you mean by the vague term "multilingual". Do you have pages on which many languages will occur? e.g. one single page displaying things in various languages? If not, then big5 is OK. Most web browsers that can handle Unicode should be able to handle big5, as long as you understand the WWW standards and conform well to them (see http://www.w3.org). OTOH, if you're going to mix many languages on a single page, then big5 is deficient. e.g. BIG5 doesn't let you write the accented characters in French. Neither can it encode Arabic letters. So, if you need a page that contains Chinese, Arabic, French (or any pair of these) at the same time, then big5 is simply not a viable option. Only Unicode addresses this need. danjourno> Unicode would be alot easier, Why? If your pages would at most contain Chinese and English _at the same time_, then big5 suffices. Since big5 is quite well established and as a long history (around 20 years), it is well supported with many many platforms, tools and programming libraries. Unicode is still quite young, and some tools that you rely on may be missing. danjourno> but I have heard that people do not like it for chinese danjourno> or japanese. Because the existing encodings (e.g. Big5, JIS) still work well for most situations, there is no driving force to switch. danjourno> Does anyone have any input on this to help me danjourno> understand why I would use BIG5 over Unicode for my danjourno> site? Whatever your decision be, make sure your web pages conform to W3C standards. In particular, use the proper "charset" parameter in the Content-Type header. It'd also be nice if your web server can do language negotiations (through the Accept-Language request header) as specified in the HTTP standard. And of course, please don't require your users to use a certain browser. Give the the choice. There can be many reasons that they can't use the browser that you select. So, please stick to the standards. -- Lee Sau Dan 李守敦(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee .