multilingual website considerations

freebie

Hi,
I'm writing up a bid proposal for a multilingual website. I was wondering if anyone has any thoughts about design considerations for a multilingual website. The website will be database-driven using PHP/MySQL. One thought I had is that a variable can be set and stored in Session scope (ie, when a user selects the language to view in), and then use SQL that is dependent on that variable (or defaults to the default language). Are there a lot of other design considerations that I need to have in mind?
Thank you for any suggestions.

Jeff

bastien

using a utf-8 (unicode) as the db character set...
cookies to store user preferences for the next time they come to your site

freebie

Thanks bastien, that's a great help.
I had one other though which is the pages charset of the pages "ContentType" meta tag. I guess this should be set to UTF-8 as well. Does anyone know if this is supported by all browsers (4.x and up)?

freebie

I had one other thought about this which is that not all fonts support Unicode characters. Does the ContentType <Meta> tag (with charset to UTF-8) take care of this? or do you have to specify fonts that support UTF-8?

bastien

Originally posted by freebie
Thanks bastien, that's a great help.
I had one other though which is the pages charset of the pages "ContentType" meta tag. I guess this should be set to UTF-8 as well. Does anyone know if this is supported by all browsers (4.x and up)?

google it for a comparison chart...i believe this is correct, but i have come across mentions of utf-8 incorrectly converting some values to the local charset

Originally posted by freebie
I had one other thought about this which is that not all fonts support Unicode characters. Does the ContentType <Meta> tag (with charset to UTF-8) take care of this? or do you have to specify fonts that support UTF-8?

yes, that is a good idea

hth