Japanese sites and wotnot

dartcol

Just to break the monotony of the poll contest going on here I was wondering if anyone had had the opportunity to build a site using double-byte characters. I'm interested in the setup you use as well as the coding format.
I've been trying, very vainly, to do it using a Mac OS X English version with DWMX. Unfortunately, after saving and uploading and then downloading I get garbled text. Why? I'm using a header.php file to store the charset. I guess DW defaults to Latin if it can't find a <head> tag.
I tried going to Modify > Page Properties and switching back to shift_JIS but no go. It just gets more garbled. Strangely, enough, on the PC (Windows XP with language packs and DWMX (Note Tab goes wonky) at home) it reverts back to the Japanese.
So, if anyone has experience of building any sites using double-byte chars, sing loud. I found a white hair today!
Cheers.

dalecosp

My old buddy Hajime is at Rice University, Texas, USA. His new title is "Language Technology Consultant" ... I feel sure he's coded pages in Japanese ...

Google for "Hajime Kumahata Rice" (yeah, maybe a tad humorous in another context) ... and you might say an old friend sent ya ... but it's been a while ... last time I saw him was the wedding, and that was early 90's ...

dartcol

Thanks. I'll give it a go. I reckon though I'm giong to have to get onto a Japanese machine to do it smoothly. Oh, for a decent budget.

dartcol

Still no joy from your friend Dalecosp but thanks for the tip anyway.

In answer to my own question I'm now using Japanese DW4 with Japanese OS X. And it's working fine, just need another computer with DW running at the same time so I know where I am with the menus.

I have another question though. Has anyone needed to insert double-byte characters into a database. We use phpwebhosting at the moment and they've told me that they don't plan to allow people to do this yet. Does anyone know of any decent hosting companies that have provided both this service as well as not having a server that is constantly crashing.

Cheers for any tips.

dalecosp

"No joy" as in, "he didn't respond", or "he responded, but what he said didn't help"... ?

I haven't done much research on it myself .. sorry, my plate is way too full right now 🙁

dartcol

I meant no word from him.

Onwards and upwards into nihongo I go ...

dalecosp

I received a cc: of an email addressed to someone (first initial R) who had apparently contacted him on this issue --- I assumed it was you.

Perhaps it got overlooked or caught in a spam filter?

dartcol

First initial R ... hmmm ... sounds about right.
Once I've done the site I'll put up a post about my experiences and see if anyone else responds with something they've done.

dalecosp

Here's what it said, mostly:

Dear R,

I am sorry I did not get back to you sooner. I was away for a vacation,
then I came back then it was very busy.

I have not looked deeper into this issue, but first thing I thought was this.

Turn your apache into shift_JIS as the default language, then every time it
spits out your header.php or whatever, it will be in shift_JIS.

We had a similar problem, but we use utf-8 to support 14 languages we
teach. Since we switched apache to utf-8 as default language, it fixed all
the problems we had. I did not have this problem with apache 1.x.x, but
they forced us to upgrade to 2.x.x. This is when we had to set
default into utf-8.

Let me know if this helps. (or not at all???)

Kasai ... yeah, I went there once to conduct an oral interview. My project
then was to find out the role of women during WWII. I was traveling across
Japan asking elderly ladies their experience.

Anyway, good luck with your project.