[General Topics] Menneisyys:
EVERYTHING you need to know about internation. issues. MUST for webadmins & -authors!

Web authors, -masters and Pocket PC Web browser users attention: everything you need to know about internationalization and "special character" issues in current PPC Web browsers

Over at the AximSite forums, I've been presented an interesting bug in famous Pocket PC Web browser NetFront, which made me experiment with the internationalization (i18n for short) issues of all Pocket PC Web browsers (and, for that matter, all the three most important desktop Windows ones). I've long been planning a test like this to see how Pocket PC Web browsers compare to desktop browsers in terms of i18n issues.

Elaborating on these issues is not just an über-geek, useless waste of time but can prove very useful if you, for example, speak a non-Western language and would like to read pages written in them or post messages on Web boards in the given language using your Pocket PC.

You can run into these problems even if you don't plan to post in any non-Western language or non-English forum / pages as can be seen in the above-linked AximSite example. All it takes a poster to use Word to compose his or her posts or articles and you end up seeing square characters (or simply nothing) instead of apostrophes and other, special, but otherwise Western characters if you use NetFront as a client. (Note that earlier, Minimo also had very similar problems with UTF-8-encoded pages I've elaborated on in here. These have been in the meantime, thanks to my bug reports, fixed. Also, very early versions of Minimo couldn't render non-Western characters on any page encoded in 8-bit as you can also see in my well-known Web Browser Bible. Those problems have long been fixed.)

Note that my inability to speak / write / read any Middle-East language (Arabic, Hebrew) and write/read Far-East languages like Chinese or Korean, I could only check non-Western, but still left-to-right languages like Russian. That is, in here, I'm unable to elaborate on the issues of these Web browsers outside the Western / Central / Eastern-European language groups. Sorry for this - not even I can speak more than 7-8 (European ones / Japanese) languages :)

1. URLs with accents

My first test was finding out whether you can enter URL's with accents in them into a given browser. (I recommend for example this article on the subject for more info. It's its test URL that I've used.)

Note that it's highly unlikely you'll ever see any URL's with accents in them (that is, this problem is pretty much non-existent); still, it's nice to know which browsers are able to render these pages. Yes, being able to use the built-in PIE as a "fallback" browser in these cases is highly advantageous.

The results (+ means compatible, - means not compatible):

Click here for the chart

As can be seen, only PIE supports this (as opposed to the desktop version) and Minimo (which I've expected, given that Minimo is the closest to its desktop version of all the Pocket PC browsers available).

(Note that, on he desktop Windows, Desktop IE7 RC1 and Opera 9.02 don't support this by default without explicit reconfiguration (see the above article on this); Mozilla / Firefox does.)

2. Displaying non-standard Western and non-Western characters

The second set of compliance tests is way more interesting and important than the first.

Note that this explanation will be a bit on the technical side; without some knowledge of HTTP and the HTML meta tags, you should skip the explanation and move straight to the summary column of the final chart (and the section following the chart). That is, don't read the following section if you don't know what HTTP is! Web browser developers (particularly those from Access!), website administrators and Web authors, on the other hand, should definitely read it in order to be absolutely sure the non-standard characters (again, it can be "plain" punctuation created by Word, not just non-Western languages!) contained in their documents are correctly rendered by all the browsers.

2.1 Test method

This test shows

whether the given browser takes into account the value of the

"Content-Type" HTTP response header

http-equiv meta tag

what the browser assumes (what it defaults to) when neither of them are defined (which is very often the case)

on the other hand, if there are both of them with different values, does the metatag-based override the HTTP response header.

For the test, I've written a custom HTTP server emulator accessed from all the tested Web browser applications. As usual, I'm making the source available so that you can freely test it if you prefer.