metatags & unicode-based languages

[Gary]

Hello,

One of my sites is to be translated into Chinese.
I'm familiar in coding the "Unicode" based language sets, so for the most
part it's fine.

But metatags: I usually do a "description" and "keywords" tag. Just not
sure if these tags should be formatted in Unicode or not. (obviously the
'html' part of the tag does not change, but the content - what's between the
quote marks.

It's an odd scenario because if the metatags are meant to be part of an
indexing process, why would a chinese web-page be indexed in english words?

If anyone has any definitive answers on this it would be appreciated...

Gary

 

[David Dorward]

But metatags: I usually do a "description" and "keywords" tag. Just not
sure if these tags should be formatted in Unicode or not.

They should

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Gary:

One of my sites is to be translated into Chinese.
I'm familiar in coding the "Unicode" based language sets, so for the
most part it's fine.

There is nothing "Unicode based" in Chinese or in any other language or set
of languages. Chinese was written thousands of years before Unicode was
invented, and spoken even much longer.

What you probably _mean_ is that you are intending to use some Unicode
encoding for pages in Chinese. That's possible, of course, and perhaps
practical.

But metatags: I usually do a "description" and "keywords" tag.

You shouldn't waste your time on them. Search engines have largely ignored
them for years, or counted them just as important, or somewhat less
important, than normal textual content. So put the relevant words into the
content, and start the content in an interesting way. This should keep you
so busy that you wan't play with <meta> fantasies.

But technically, there is nothing special in the contents of <meta> tag
attributes when you use a Unicode encoding. If you used, say, ISO-8859-7
encoding for an HTML document, surely you would use - you would _have_ to
use - it inside those attributes, too. There is no way to change the
encoding within an HTML document.

It's an odd scenario because if the metatags are meant to be part of
an indexing process, why would a chinese web-page be indexed in
english words?

Huh? It's your _question_ that has an odd scenario. You're confusing
encoding with languages.

I guess you're really asking whether an attribute value can contain
non-ASCII characters in HTML. It surely can. You can use any characters
there.

 

[Gary]

But metatags: I usually do a "description" and "keywords" tag. Just not
sure if these tags should be formatted in Unicode or not.

Here's an example of what I found on Chinese sites:

<meta name="keywords" content="?????,1976?,1987?,Microsoft
Windows,Unicode,Windows 2000,Windows XP,?????,????,????,??" />

And another:

<meta name="description"
content="在過去三十年，普仁羅華到世界各地，在五十多個國家舉辦節目，向成千上萬的人演講。他的訊息很單純：你所尋找的，就在你內在。人們透過一個所謂「知識」的過程，就可能跟內在聯繫上。">

And another:

<meta name="description" content="????????? -
??????????????????????????????" />
<meta name="keywords"
content="????,??,????,??,??,??,??,??,??,??,????,????,????,????,????,????,????,????,????,????,????,????,?????,????,??,??,??,??,????,??,??,??,asia
times, asiatimes, online, newspaper, news, event, gazette, publicist,
headline, article, economy, china news, mainland news, hong kong news, macau
news, taiwan news, asian news, forum" />Not sure if these Chinese sympbols
will render properly in newsgroup readers or not, but the above samples demo
a mix of styles, some printing the Characters straight into the HTML, some
using unicode sequences, some a mix of both.The bottom line seems to be
"what necessity are Metatags at all" ... meaning - is there still any
significant level of web page indexing that makes use of Metatag
content?There doesn't seem to be much evidence around supporting the
inclusion of Meta data at this point.Thanks for your opinions...Gary

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Gary:

Here's an example of what I found on Chinese sites:

What's the point of all these quotations?

Not sure if these
Chinese sympbols will render properly in newsgroup readers or not,

Of course they don't, especially since your newsreader did not specify the
character encoding.

but the above samples demo a mix of styles, some printing the
Characters straight into the HTML, some using unicode sequences, some
a mix of both.

Probably. (After all, the data did not get across properly, and you did not
cite the URLs.) So what? It's the same as in element content, of course.

The bottom line seems to be "what necessity are
Metatags at all" ...

No, the answer to that question is trivially "None". The question whether
they are _useful_ at all is slightly more complicated.