RE: questions about encodings

["Schupbach ,Mr William" <w.schupbach@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to all who replied to my enquiry about incompatibilities between two
web catalogues using  different encodings (e.g. one using Unicode UTF-8 and
the other Western).  I received the following good news from Bob Rasmussen
of Rasmussen Software, Inc.:

"I used my browser to duplicate your problem.  The root problem, as I
surmised, is that the web page itself (in both sites) does not identify its
charset.  However, using IE [Internet Explorer] 5.5, with
"View:Encoding:Auto-select set" on, it was able to switch back and forth
between your UTF8 [Unicode] site and the ... Western site [i.e. the site
using Western encoding].  I seem to remember that IE's "charset guessing"
(auto-select) was one thing that they improved in 5.5.  I went to another
machine that has IE 5.0.  Initially, with Auto-select on, it failed to
detect your UTF8.  So I manually set it to UTF8.  This brought UTF8 into the
"short list" visible under Encoding.  After that, it switched back and forth
successfully.  So you may be able to improve on the situation by your choice
of browser and version. But III still needs to clean up their act."

So if everybody uses Internet Explorer 5.5 as their browser, the problem is
solved.  Of course that is not the actual situation, but it provides hope
that the solution is in sight.

In addition, Martha Plettner at The American University in Cairo kindly drew
my attention to the catalogue at http://lib.aucegypt.edu which has good
renderings of Arabic characters and of their transliterations, with an
explanation of how they were produced.

William Schupbach
Wellcome Library
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE
England
e-mail w.schupbach@xxxxxxxxxx
library catalogue http://library.wellcome.ac.uk
(To view catalogue, use Netscape browser View>Encoding>Unicode UTF8, or
Internet Explorer View>Fonts>UTF8) 

[Registered charity no. 210183, Trustee registered in England no. 2711000]



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