Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers: Some Guidelines

Introduction
Font Size, Typeface and Characters per Line
HTML Coding: Charset Code
HTML Coding: Page Titles
Display of Different Character Sets: Solution One
Display of Different Character Sets: Solution Two
Summary
References

Adaptive Web Sites: An Introduction

Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

TradeOff Cube: A Graphical User Interface Device

By Li Cao
Page 3 of 8

HTML Coding: Charset Code

The character set for Simplified Chinese is GB2312 while that for Traditional Chinese Big5. Normally, when web designers design the webpages using authoring software like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, the software automatically inserts the charset code for the default language. Nonetheless, things are different for frames as some software packages do not add this code for the frames.

This may not be a problem for browsers with default language set at GB2312, as the majority of mainland Chinese netizens uses a Chinese version of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

Fig. 1: A page that contains frames with charset tag undefined. The contents in the ovals are not displayed correctly. From www.demeng.com

However, for overseas Chinese readers, the result may be garbled display in the frames. Fig. 1 on the right shows an example, in which the contents in the left column, lower part of the middle column and the top right corner are not correctly displayed.

If the authoring software does not add charset codes to frames, the web designer may need to manually add them. Another advantage of setting the correct character set is that if the reader is viewing a Chinese language page using Internet Explorer (5.0 and above) and there is no proper font installed, the browser automatically detects this and downloads the relevant font from a Microsoft website. Netscape Navigator, however, does not support this auto-install function.

<--previous next-->

Last revised 12/1/2001.