meta tags in foreign character sets

[Jascinder]

Hello,

When designing a web site with a foreign character set, ie, Japanese or
Chinese characters, should the <title> and <description>, <keywords> meta
tags be implanted with the foreign character set codes, or with "english"
characters?

thanks for any advice,

JS

 

[rf]

When designing a web site with a foreign character set, ie, Japanese or
Chinese characters, should the <title> and <description>, <keywords> meta
tags be implanted with the foreign character set codes, or with "english"
characters?

That would depend on what you want your viewer to read when they look at the
title or find the site in google, and indeed what they search for (assuming
google pays attention to keywords which it probably does not).

Think like your viewer: You are Japanese. Would you expect to read English
in the sites title? (hint: many Japanese people do not speak, let alone read
English. Most certainly the taxi driver you get from the train station to
the hotel does not).

 

[Toby Inkster]

When designing a web site with a foreign character set, ie, Japanese or
Chinese characters, should the <title> and <description>, <keywords> meta
tags be implanted with the foreign character set codes, or with "english"
characters?

If the page is aimed at Chinese or Japanese visitors, why would you want
to put the TITLE in English?

 

[Philip Ronan]

Hello,

When designing a web site with a foreign character set, ie, Japanese or
Chinese characters, should the <title> and <description>, <keywords> meta
tags be implanted with the foreign character set codes, or with "english"
characters?

No of course not.

All the browsers I've come across can understand Japanese META tags just
fine. It helps if you declare the text encoding, either with a META tag or
a Content-Type HTTP header

 

[Lauri Raittila]

No of course not.

All the browsers I've come across can understand Japanese META tags just
fine.

What browser that you have come across have understood meta tags? What
way?

It helps if you declare the text encoding, either with a META tag or
a Content-Type HTTP header

Sounds that you almost have a clue?

 

[Philip Ronan]

What browser that you have come across have understood meta tags? What
way?

As far as I can tell, they *all* understand meta tags. I don't know *how*
they understand them -- perhaps you should ask the programmers that made
them.

If you're having problems, could you please explain in a bit more detail.

Sounds that you almost have a clue?

I translate Japanese for a living.

Shift_JIS and EUC are the two most common forms of text encoding for
Japanese web pages . If you're writing a Japanese web page, either specify
the Content-Type with an HTTP header like this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=Shift_JIS

or with a meta tag like this:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">

That's all there is to it.

 

[Lauri Raittila]

As far as I can tell, they *all* understand meta tags. I don't know *how*
they understand them -- perhaps you should ask the programmers that made
them.

If you're having problems, could you please explain in a bit more detail.

Actually, I think I was thinking too faast. Some browsers actually do
understand some meta tags. They put them in DOM, and sometimes even use
the contents. But mostly, they are ignored...

I translate Japanese for a living.

And it only helps if you declare encoding? I think that you *must*
declare encoding, or use character references. Otherwise, you don't get
japanise glyphs.

Shift_JIS and EUC are the two most common forms of text encoding for
Japanese web pages . If you're writing a Japanese web page, either specify
the Content-Type with an HTTP header like this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=Shift_JIS

or with a meta tag like this:

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">

That's all there is to it.

Of course, latter only works because good luck...