Korean Language Web Site - not displaying text in IE - HTML forum at WebmasterWorld

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Korean Language Web Site - not displaying text in IE

webcolors

7:36 pm on Dec 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hello,
I'm trying to create a website in Korean language, I was able to paste the text from MSWord into the dreamweaver MX04 page and I can see the text, when I preview the page in MSIE I do not see the text I just see?, I uploaded the page to the server and I still see same problem, I can see other korean web pages with no errors. What would the problem be?

Thank you very much for your help

jbinbpt

9:47 pm on Dec 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

If you view the source code, what do you see?

Does the meta tag look like this?
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ko">

Welcome to WebmasterWorld. Enjoy

webcolors

6:57 pm on Dec 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hello,
No I don't see that, I just inserted it and nothing happen! Is there a Korean version of Dreamweaver that I need to use to be able to create a Korean Site?

When I close the document and reopen it again, the korean text changes to? (question marks)

Thanks a lot for your help.

webcolors

8:39 pm on Dec 17, 2006 (gmt 0)

Dear jbinbpt,
I really really really appreciate you hint, I tried few things and finally it worked! here is what i did, maybe this will help some other people on this great site:
I replaced the standard tag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> with this tag: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Maybe part of the problem was that I tried to create the Korean pages based on the template that I previously created for the english site.

Again, thank you very much, without your hint, I wouldn't be able to do the right research.

Cheers.

jbinbpt

12:53 am on Dec 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Good for you. I would still keep the meta tag in.

webcolors

3:30 pm on Dec 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Did you mean this tag? <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="ko">

Do I need to keep it with the other one? What's the benefits?

Thanks.

LifeinAsia

4:58 pm on Dec 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

Cutting and pasting double-byte characters to/from Microsoft products often results in problems, depending on which version you're using.

You definitely need to use the correct META Content-Type tag. UTF-8 may work for the most part, depending on how the characters on your page are encoded. EUC-KR is another common one, specifically for the Korean language.

webcolors

3:03 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

LifeinAsia,
Thank you very much, I believe what you wrote is very important, I'm still no sure whether I need to keep the same Meta I used or replace it, and with what!

I want to create the site and I want to create it the right way, so any more info will be highly appreciated. I'm not an HTML code expert.

Thanks a lot.

LifeinAsia

4:49 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

If it's working with UTF-8, then I'd say stick with it. But definitely do some testing across different machines. Check with a Korean OS machines as well as an English OS machine- make sure things look OK on both.

encyclo

5:05 pm on Dec 19, 2006 (gmt 0)

The reason why the copy/paste failed is that the charset ISO-8859-1 only contains western-European characters, whereas UTF-8 is a universal charset. UTF-8 is a great choice when dealing with many different languages and alphabets.

You should always declare the charset and document language. For the charset, you use the meta element as you have now - just make sure it is placed above the title element. To define the language, it is best practice to simpy add the

lang

attribute to the

html

element rather than using a meta element:

<html [b]lang="ko"[/b]>

Other than that, the document will function in much the same way as an English-language document. One note about non-western alphabets - you should define the text direction with the

dir

attribute if the text is read other than from left to right. So for right-to-left text (Hebrew or Arabic, for example), you do this:

<html [b]dir="rtl"[/b]>

(RTL=right-to-left, LTR=left-to-right)

Some useful references from the forum library [webmasterworld.com]:

Character encoding, entity references and UTF-8 [webmasterworld.com]

Meta tags and more - from <head> to </head> [webmasterworld.com]

webcolors

9:19 pm on Dec 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

Thank you guys very much, I appreciate it.

tedster

11:13 pm on Dec 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

You might want to check out our Asia-Pacific forum. Here's a good "master" thread with some specific technical help for Korean websites.

[webmasterworld.com...]