Japanese meta tags

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Japanese meta tags

TravelSite

12:58 pm on Aug 29, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do Japanese meta tags on our sites.

I have the following html/meta tags.
<html lang="ja">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ja">

For the Keywords and Description tags I'm a little bit confused. On several sites these tags contain special characters like "ニア". On dreamweaver on my system however I've just copied and pasted the Japanese characters directly onto the page. Can anyone suggest which method I should use?

bill

1:33 am on Aug 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

On several sites these tags contain special characters like "ニア".

Those are Japanese characters expressed in Unicode. You aren't using a Unicode encoding method, so stick with the Japanese characters in your editor.

David_M

2:27 am on Aug 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

Yeah, stay away from unicode- i think shift-jis is the most commonly used.

I just use this tag:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html;CHARSET=shift_jis">

TravelSite

8:29 am on Aug 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

Many thanks for the advice,

Unfourtunately this means that some of the translations done on our site is already in unicode! Is it ok to have unicode characters while still using Shift_JIS for the meta tags - or do I need to change it to one or the other?

David_M

8:54 am on Aug 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

You should change it over to shift-jis.

Heres a nifty little text editor that may let you convert those pages :) I've only used it from shift-jis to utf though...
[babelstone.co.uk...]

bill

9:52 am on Aug 30, 2005 (gmt 0)

Interesting tool David. I'll have to check that one out.

Unicode encodings are particularly problematic for Japanese. David's right, you should use Shift_JIS encoding instead.

Here's an online Unicode Decoder [masaka.dw.land.to] that I've used for e-mail in the past.

DamonHD

11:01 am on Aug 31, 2005 (gmt 0)

Hi Bill,

What's the (main) problem with UNICODE and Japanese?

Rgds

Damon

bill

12:48 pm on Aug 31, 2005 (gmt 0)

The main problem is software compatibility. Newer browsers don't have that much trouble, but legacy browsers do. Also you have to remember that your site will not only be read by people on PCs anymore. Handheld OSs, phones, and other hardware can be used as well. All Japanese programmers and web design people I've spoken to over the last 15 years have been pretty consistent on this. Don't use Unicode if you want the end result to be compatible to the widest possible audience.