I checked out google.de.
It seemed that in the source codes, they used HTML equivalents for all the "special" German characters in the source codes.
My Questions are:
1) What is the right way to do German and French sites? Covert all special characters to HTML equivalents?
2) Is there a set up for the site wide, or page wide that all special characters will be converted to html equivalents automatically, even I wrote the source codes in German and French?
3) How German and French web programmers deal with it? When they open the source codes to read some texts. They are not seeing the real German or French, they read all these texts with HTML equivalents?
4) How they use dreamweaver to edit these text? Is there a set up that the programmers type in German and French, and Dreamweaver saved these codes in HTML equivalents?
5) What happens if the German and French programmers want to find certain text from source codes. Since these text has been auto coverted to HTML equivalents, if the programmer type in real German and French in "find" or "replace" box and search in source code, will he be able to find these texts which already be coverted to html equivalents? The web tools I used couldn't find these text if somehow they are converted to html equivalents.
6) Now here comes the real problem. The database. The values are saved in the database and then retrived from database and display on the web site. In the database, we should save German as German, French as French, not its equivalents, right? Otherwise, how can we do the search? When display them in the web site, do I need to htmlentities() on all the values I get from database and then display them on the web pages.
7) In my database, some fields saved values from rich text editor, such as tinymce. I cannot use htmlentities() on these values to convert French or German characters, it will also covert othe php tags. I want to reserve these html tags, only convert the German and French characters.
8) Just exactly how German and French guys write the web sites dealing with html equivalents issues. I wrote a English site, and duplcate it for the German version and French version. My client offer me the German and French text, I just cut and paste it to replace the English text, it works perfectly. Until I found out some how some (strange enough not all) strange German characters and French characters transferred to HTML equivalents. Then when I try to use Find or Replace functions on the origianl German or French text, I cannot find them any more. The source codes are in HTML equivalents now.
