FAO Web guide: 6.6a Guidelines for language encoding

Web Guide home 1. Introduction 2. Web publishing basics 3. Planning 4. Content collection 5. Design 6. Construction 7. Testing 8. Launch 9. Maintenance 10. Writing for the Web Resources 1.1 FAO and the Internet: What is an FAO Web site? 1.2 Quality criteria of Web sites 1.3 An introduction to Web accessibility at FAO 1.4 Electronic publishing at FAO 2.1 Content quality 2.2 Roles in Web publishing 2.3 Web site quality clearance and continuity 2.4 Policy and legal matters 2.5 Language coverage policy 2.6 Web site traffic monitoring 2.7 Static and dynamic content 2.8 Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.9 Social Media Guidelines 2.10 Current server structure at FAO 3.1 What and (who) is the site for and what is it about?3.2 Define the Web site subject scope 3.3 Define your audience 3.4 Identify resources 3.5 How to track and share planning decisions 4.1 Developing a content inventory 4.2 FAO content repositories 4.3 Metadata 5.1 Review user needs 5.2 Defining information architecture 5.3 Prepare interface design 5.4 Define technical implementation 5.5 Tracking design implementation 6.1 Management of files/naming 6.2 HTML and coding 6.3 Use of style sheets 6.4 Graphics 6.5 Conversion of electronic documents 6.6 Language encoding 6.7 Link management 6.8 Printable pages 6.9 Providing access to search 6.10 Domains, URLs and aliases 6.11 Tools 7.1 Testing approaches 7.2 How to use the test environment 8.1 Launch checklist 8.2 Promotion 9.1 Quality assurance and routine checking 9.2 Update procedures for Web sites 9.3 Web usage analysis 9.4 Evaluation of Web sites 10.1 Writing a page of text 10.2 Organizing your text on the page 10.3 How to optimize content for search engines 10.4 How to write feedback, error messages 10.5 Quotations 10.6 Non-discriminatory language Checklists Acronyms Newsletter Guidelines Policies Procedures Web resources Tag cloud Contacts 2.3a Data ownership 2.3b Regulation of access to servers 2.3c Clearance of Web sites by OCP 2.4a Country names, flags and maps 2.4b The fao.org domain, subdomains and root directories 2.4c Use of FAO emblem and logos 2.4d Politically sensitive material 2.6a FAO Web sites: the user perspective 2.6b How to gather user information: user research 2.6c Designing for the user 2.6d Page size and downloading 2.7a Static content 2.7b Dynamic content 2.7c Content Management Systems (CMS) 2.9a FAO and Facebook 2.9b FAO and Flickr 2.9c FAO and Google+2.9d FAO and LinkedIn 2.9e FAO and SlideShare 2.9f FAO and Twitter 2.9g FAO and Wikipedia 2.9h FAO and YouTube 4.3a What is metadata?4.3b Why embed metadata in Web pages?4.3c How to embed basic metadata in the HTML head section 4.3d How to create or improve current metadata 4.3e FAO standards for encoded metadata 4.3f Metadata, search engines and their robots 5.2a Identify Web pages and subject categories 5.2b Define navigation 5.2c Define metadata and search requirements 5.3a Corporate visual identity 5.3b Web site design usability principles 6.1a How to use the FTP server 6.2a HTML and XHTML 6.2b Browser compatibility 6.2c New windows and pop-ups 6.2d JavaScript 6.2e HTML title and metadata tags 6.3a CSS and Web accessibility 6.3b Cascading Style sheets (CSS) and browser compatibility 6.4a Graphic formats 6.4b Use of images on the Web 6.4c Photos 6.5a Converting Word documents into PDF 6.6a Guidelines for language encoding 6.6b Multilingual interfaces 6.7a Linking files across languages 6.7b Links to the FAO home page, FAO copyright and AskFAO 6.7c Absolute and relative links 6.7d Avoid spamming on e-mail addresses 6.8a How to prepare print-safe Web pages using CSS 6.8b Other ways of preparing print-safe Web pages 6.11a Recommended editing tools for Web site construction 6.11b Graphics, document and conversion tools 9.1a Maintaining quality 9.1b Content freshness
	Web Guide > webguide > 6. Construction > 6.6 Language encoding > 6.6a Guidelines for language encoding
	6.6a Guidelines for language encoding Guideline What is character encoding? Character encoding is the organization of a set of numeric codes that represent all meaningful characters (single letter, digit, space, punctuation, etc.) of a script system in memory. Each character is stored in memory as a number (e.g. A = 65). When a user enters characters, the user's key strokes are converted to character codes. When the characters are displayed on the screen, the character codes are converted to the glyphs of a font. In most character encoding standards, the character set changes to represent the language being used, so the upper-level characters may include symbols, accented Roman letters, Cyrillic or other characters, depending on the character encoding chosen. For example, the character Ó in the Macintosh Standard Roman Character Set is in the same code point (205) as the equal sign (=) in Windows extended ASCII encoding. Character sets The character set used for English, French and Spanish (and most common European languages) is ISO-8859-1. For Asian languages that use ideographs, or hieroglyphs, instead of letters, different character sets should be used. The most common one used for Chinese is gb_2312-80. For Arabic, the character set is different for Windows (windows-1256) and Macintosh (ISO-8859-6). In addition, it is important to specify in the Web page that the text should be displayed from right to left: <HTML dir="RTL" lang="ar"> Unicode UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format, 8 bit encoding form) is an encoding form of the Unicode Standard, the universal character encoding standard used for the representation of text for computer processing. The Unicode Standard has the capacity to encode all of the characters used for the written languages of the world. Each Unicode index refers unambiguously to a given character. One disadvantage of Unicode is that it takes more space to store plain text and transmission of Unicode data can therefore use more bandwidth. It is difficult editing Web pages in Arabic and Chinese if these languages are not installed on the computer in use, as the Unicode characters are less intuitive than accented characters. Nevertheless, Unicode is being adopted more widely. When all software and operating system developers adopt Unicode, we will end up with the best standardized forum for processing and exchanging multilingual documents. Remember... Character Encoding Tips! Insert the correct encoding in all your Web pages, otherwise they may not display correctly on some computers! This is particularly important for Arabic and Chinese. Make sure that all the accented characters are written as character entities (i.e. é instead of é), otherwise they will not display correctly on some computers! This applies particularly to French and Spanish.