Unicode has its shortcomings with Asian scripts, but it's currently the best we have to display characters of many non-European (and many European, for that matter) languages on web pages. Unfortunately, large amounts of the Web aren't ready for Unicode yet, Wikipedia being a prominent example. This basically means that Asian scripts or other non-Latin scripts, when entered as Unicode, get displayed as "??".
There is a way to work around that, however, even if the web page uses an ancient encoding scheme: Just use HTML entities for your Unicode characters. For some reason I don't quite understand, they ALWAYS get displayed correctly in modern browsers, regardless of the encoding set by the server. Of course, looking up the correct values is a tedious task. But don't let that stop you: The Unicode Characters to HTML Character Entities Converter will do it for you. What a gem! Life can be wonderful with the right tools online. Posted by jens at April 19, 2004 04:51 PM | TrackBack