A "bonus" challenge to help us further our understanding of encoding and the critical importance of this knowledge when working on websites.
Estimated time for completion: 1/2 hr.
- Your friend who studies Chinese has an email from a friend in Taiwan (Taiwan uses Traditional Chinese). He is telling you about his problem that he can never view his web-based Yahoo! emails from his friends. All he ever sees is a bunch of garbage characters. Here's his email:
What is the only way to solve his problem?
A. Save the file down from the web browser as an HTML file (File > Save As... > save the page as HTML). Open the HTML in Microsoft Word. The Chinese will now be readable.
B. View the HTML source in the browser (Internet Explorer: View > Source ; Firefox: View > Page Source) and change the META encoding tag "charset=" property to read "shift-jis." Save the file and then refresh. The page will display correctly.
C. Manually select the proper encoding for Traditional Chinese from the web browser, this will refresh the page automatically and the page will display correctly.
- Internet Explorer: View > Encoding > More > Chinese Traditional (Big5)
- Firefox: View > Character Encodings > More Encodings > East Asian > Chinese Traditional (Big5)
D. There is nothing he can do, the email has been corrupted and is not recoverable.
* Feel free to try out each of the options
- Your German friend has made a web-page. He sends the page to his friends to look at on their computers at home.
- His Russian friend who looks at the page says that all the accents in the German are showing up as Cyrillic on his computer
- His Greek friends says that all the accents are showing up as Greek
- His Chinese friend says that all the accents are showing up as Chinese
Part A. Do you know what to tell your friend to do so this doesn't keep happening?
Part B. Which code page(s) can he use?
PLEASE SEND...
- ANSWERS TO THE ENCODING EXERCISES: QUESTIONS #1 (Multiple Choice) & #2 (Parts "A" & "B")