Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers: Some Guidelines

Designing for Overseas Chinese Readers: Some Guidelines

1. Introduction
2. Font Size, Typeface and Characters per Line
3. HTML Coding: Charset Code
4. HTML Coding: Page Titles
5. Display of Different Character Sets: Solution One
6. Display of Different Character Sets: Solution Two
7. Summary
8. References

Adaptive Web Sites: An Introduction

Designing Effective Online Press Rooms

TradeOff Cube: A Graphical User Interface Device

By Li Cao
Page 6 of 8

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Display of Different Character Sets: Solution Two

Another solution is to do without the character sets and their fonts for good. The US version of Sina.com at home.sina.com is an excellent example of implementing such a solution. Sina.com is now the first and only Chinese news website that offers four methods to read the stories, which are Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese in both text and graphic (GIF) presentations. Apparently, the site uses a software tool to automatically convert news stories into clickable GIF image maps.

One downside of using GIFs is that the user cannot change the size of the fonts, which may discourage people with less-than-perfect vision. The other disadvantage is that if the user wants to use the content, she can print it out or save it as a file, but cannot copy and paste text directly into a word processing program. In addition, there will be no visual difference between visited and unvisited links.

How does a web designer choose between the text and the graphic presentations? My personal opinion is that if the information is extremely important and does not need constant update, a graphic presentation should be used. Otherwise, present the information in text.

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Copyright © 2001 by Li Cao. All rights reserved.