B211 Lab Week 10

Laboratory Week 10 - Language Settings in Web Browsers

Learning Objectives:

Understanding the language set-up mechanisms for popular browsers.

Before doing the tutorial, please read:

Week 6 lecture on Internet Accessibility for People with Different Cultural Backgrounds.

Software required:

This lab requires use of Netscape Navigator 4.0+, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0+ web browsers. The exercise also requires Microsoft Word with its HTML support installed.

This lab also requires some changes to be made to browsers, and the installation of various software. This is not possible for students in the internal labs. Therefore, doing this lab is optional. If you have a personal computer at home, you may try this. Internal students using the labs should look through the instructions and look at the examples where they can.

The material from this lab will not be assessed, except the parts that comes from the lectures.

Instructions:

View some non-English web pages (for this first exercise, use Netscape Navigator 4.7 or below, or Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4 or below)
There are many pages on the Web today which are not in English. Here are some example non-English versions of Yahoo.com which your browser would (probably) be able to display:

German (http://de.yahoo.com/)

Italian (http://it.yahoo.com/)

French (http://fr.yahoo.com/)

Most of the characters will be displayed properly. This is because most of the Unicode characters in these languages are also in the character set ISO 8859-1 set (or what is called "Western Latin1"), a subset of Unicode. The fonts required to display most of this chacracter set is probably already installed on your operating system (fonts like Times New Roman or Arial - to check the fonts installed on Windows95/98/NT/2000, select the item Start>Programs>Accessories>Character Map).

Assuming you haven't already installed and turned on multi-lingual support in your browser (IE 5 by default have multi-lingual support), you will notice that there are a few characters in the above pages which do not appear properly, and are shown as squares or question marks. This is because they make use of Unicode characters which your installed fonts cannot handle.

Now have a look at some example pages from Yahoo.com where most of the characters are outside Western Latin1:

Chinese (http://cn.yahoo.com/)

Japanese (http://www.yahoo.co.jp/)

Korean (http://kr.yahoo.com/)

You can see that most of the text in these pages are displayed incorrectly.

To have a more languages, click on the links at Alan Wood's Unicode Resources.

Multi-lingual support in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (for this first exercise, use Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5 and above)
For this exercise, you will need to have IE 5 or above. IE 5 is available in the internal labs. If you are doing this from home but do not have IE 5, you can download and install it from the Microsoft download site. Note that the process involves downloading and installing over 10Mb. On a typical 56kb modem, it can take over an hour and a half to complete. If you do not already have IE 5, and do not wish to incur the time and download costs, you may choose to skip the rest of this point.

MS IE 5 has in-built support for a few more languages than it's previous versions and compared to Netscape Navigator 5 and below. It also makes use of the embedded fonts mentioned in page 33 of the lecture, where HTML pages can specify where the browser can automatically download required fonts.

In IE 5, you should first turn on auto-detection of language encodings. This can be done by selecting the menu item View>Encoding>Auto-Select. By selecting this, IE will automatically detect the language of the web page (by looking at the fields in the HTTP response messages - see lecture) and display it it in a way it believes appropriate. It will guide you through an installation of multi-lingual support components if necessary. If you look at the menu item View>Encoding again, you will see a whole list of character encodings that IE 5 can support. This listing is what is currently defined in Unicode (see lecture notes again).

Now have a look that the example pages listed above again. You will see that the squares and question marks characters in the German, Italian and French pages are displayed in the special fonts as they should. When you access the Chinese, Japanese and Korean pages, you will prompted to allow the browser to automatically install the required language support for the languages. The support software required for these languages are about 2Mb each. Once the automatic download and install is completed, you will see the pages in their respective characters as they are meant to be displayed.

Multi-lingual support in Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator 5 and below do not automate the process fo downloading and installing the required language support software. To get Navigator to display multi-lingual pages involves

Installing the required fonts.
Most multi-lingual fonts have to be purchased. Examples places where you can download trial versions are UnionWay and TwinBridge.

Configuring the browser to use the installed fonts.
This would involve

Opening your Netscape browser.

Click on the menu item Edit>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts.

Where it says For the Encoding choose the language that you are interested in reading in.

For both Variable width font and Fixed width font, choose the name of the font that you downloaded and installed.

Another language-support feature in Netscape is in the menu item Edit>Preferences>Navigator>Languages. Here, you can add and order your preferences for web pages to be displayed in different languages. This option will only be invoked if the HTML uses multiple unicode character sets - something that currently is not widely done.

Other multi-lingual support software for browsers
If you are interested, you can also explore some other multi-lingual support software. Most of them installs the required fonts, then sits in the background supporting your default browser to display web pages using different character sets. These packages also include input software, to allow you to create non-English unicode characters in a document.

UnionWay and TwinBridge above are examples of such software. Another two examples are NJ Star and Richwin.

Creating web pages with unicode characters

To create documents containing these multi-lingual characters, you need editors which allows you to insert these non-ASCII text characters. A lot of standard software, such as GoLive, FrontPage and MS-Word in Windows (example descriptions is again available at Alan Wood's Unicode Resources) already allow you to do so.

Exercise:

Using the description for MS-Word as described in the link in (5) above, create a web page with non-English characters in it. Then view the pages using your browser.

Remember to read the week's development on the Internet by scanning through relevant articles in the IT section of Tuesday's the Australian newspaper - use the online version or the physical copy in the University library. Get into the habit of keeping up with current developments. Test your knowledge of major developments by going through the Good News Week self-tests.

H.L. Hiew
Unit Coordinator