[pmwiki-users] Re: Translation [was pmwiki-users] i18n and iso-8859-13

[Algis Kabaila]

On Friday 08 April 2005 14:25, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 06:53:12PM +1000, Algis Kabaila wrote:
> > Actually, I would like to add (in 
> > Lithuanian) simple instructions of making a site accept the Lithuanian 
> > charactes and operate with utf-8 encoding, if there are no objections.
> 
> If you're asking about this for the PmWikiLt.* group on pmwiki.org,
> there aren't any objections.  My general rule is that whoever is doing
> the work of building/maintaining the language translations gets to
> decide the contents and structure of those translations.  :-)

OK, I assume that I am the "chief translator" and will put the comment
about installation of XLPageLt into a site  RSN. (My RSN is a bit slower 
these days than it used to be).
> 
> > Translation of some words, viz. "by" is difficult because its meaning is 
> > dependent on context.   I thought that the best was not to attempt 
> > translation of "by" at all, in order to avoid the "hydraulic  hammer" 
> > becoming "water sheep".  I see that a note on the XLPage tells to delete 
> > items that are not translated.  Can we just comment it out with # or will 
> > that not work?
> 
> It can be commented out with #, left empty, or even removed altogether.
> 
> > Also, would you mind if I ask a 'non-wiki' question - how to 
> > correctly specify utf-8 encoding in a web page?  (I have used meta 
> > tags under the wrong impression that this was a standard way 
> > of doing it. Currently my **wrong** header looks like this:
> >
> >  <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type">  ).  
> 
> Well, meta tags are just one way of doing it.  The HTML 4.01 standard
> identifies three mechanisms, highest priority to lowest:
> 
>    1. An HTTP charset parameter in a Content-Type field
>    2. A <meta> declaration with "http-equiv" set to "Content-Type"
>    3. The charset attribute set on an element specifying an external 
resource
> 
> So, the best and recommended way to specify the encoding is in the 
> webserver configuration itself, not in the individual web pages.  
> Unfortunately in your case, Apache was (mis)configured to always
> specifying a charset parameter, which overrides any <meta> tag
> the HTML document might have in it.
> 
> Anyway, to answer your question, the standard, W3C-recommended way to 
> specify utf-8 of documents is to configure Apache to do it.  There's
> several ways to do this.  If all of the documents in a directory are
> known to be utf-8, then the .htaccess file can contain
> 
>     AddDefaultCharset  UTF-8
> 
> If Apache has been configured with content negotiation and the standard
> charsets, then one can also specify utf-8 for a document by adding a 
> ".utf8" extension (no hyphen) onto its filename, such as "mydoc.html.utf8".
> Other encodings might use ".iso8859-1", ".cp-1251", etc.
> 
> However, if it's not feasible to configure Apache for the charset
> encodings, then one can tell Apache not to do send any charset 
> parameter with
> 
>     AddDefaultCharset  Off
> 
> and then the browser will use any encoding specified by the document's
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" ... /> tag.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Pm

Thank you for your comprehensive explanation of headers.  I can not change the 
Apache config on our ISP (PCUG-TIP),  but I certainly can do it  on my own 
HAN.  Basically, I am quite happy with the way the two pmwikis that I manage 
work and reasonably satisfied with my home pages, too.  I just can not stop 
being curious about the rights and the wrongs of this world...

Gratefully,

Al.
> 

-- 
Algis Kabaila
http://www.pcug.org.au/~akabaila