UTF-8 and IE, or How I Learned to Worry and Hate The BOM
// April 14th, 2008 // Development
I worked on a Chinese microsite for the NBoC last week, and I thought I’d share a few learnings from my experience.
First off, the translation company originally provided the translated text as graphics. From an ease-of-use, ease-of-implementation, consistent-display perspective, this makes sense. But images of text are useless to search engines and screen readers, so we asked the translation company for UTF-8 encoded text instead. There was a bit of confusion, but in the end we got a Word doc with the required text in it.
This was my first time working with Chinese text, and I found it difficult to find good sources of recent, up-to-date information on working with chinese on the web. Most of what I found through my Google searches were a few years old, at a time when “major browsers” meant IE and Netscape only. The information was useful, as I believe most of it still applied, but I’d love to know if there’s something better out there. (I’ll post the links I have at the bottom of this post, but if you have any to add, please post them in the comments) More after the jump…
