The Innocent Statement

I have come across a strange bug (at least I think it's a bug) in Internet Explorer.

As I mentioned yesterday I am starting work on a project that needs multi-lingual pages. As it happens I have been working on a smaller project first (for the publishers of the Engvocab.com book), and their website needs to have (to start with) English, Welsh and Japanese pages.

I quickly learned that to have special welsh and Japanese characters display on a HTML page, the document must be UTF-8 encoded. No, biggie, I thought.

UTF-8 Includes

Now, on this website I will be using PHP to allow me to switch easily from (Yes I do chop and change between ASP.net and PHP – depending on what is more appropriate) one language to the other. Certain things, such as the navigation, will need to change in the template file depending on the selected language. For this reason the Navigation comes in via a PHP Include.

The strangest thing is that when I have an included file encoded in UTF-8, Internet Explorer adds a space before the first element of approximately 15 pixels. At a moment my solution it to have a separate CSS document for IE (Using conditional comments) with a negative top margin for the effected elements.

I haven't got a clue why this is happening, or what I can do about it. Anyone else ever heard of this?

At Netring we are taking on a new project called Engvocab.com, a book and website combination (Just a note - we are not responsible what what is on the engvocab.com domain at the moment). It will be an essential English vocabulary for people learning the English language, and the first target audience will be the Japanese.

Taking on this project means that we have had some homework to do. Strange though it may seem, we haven't had the opportunity to develop many Japanese websites before. I have been doing some research into the standards for dealing with the Japanese language (and indeed other languages for future additions to the project).

During my swatting up, I found this great W3C Draft. It contains lots useful information and food for thought. I recommend that anyone who thinks they would like to create multi-lingual websites read this.

Lost in Translation

I have come across a dead end in my research. In the W3C Draft, there is a section called "Styling using the language attribute". In this section they recommend styling each different language with different a font-family. There are even some examples for various languages (the method of styling is debatable – due to support from IE, but that is another matter). Unfortunately, I am now drawing a blank on what font-families are the best to use for Japanese.

Does anyone know what fonts are best to use for Japanese copy? Which ones have good support on a range of operating systems? And which ones might be the most readable?

Update

After I posted this entry I realised that I need a bigger audience to get my answer (let's face it, my site doesn't really have the biggest readership). For this reason I went to the Web Standards Group list for help. I have had a couple of replies that proved invaluable. I would like to share what they had to say here, and the links they gave me.

Philippe Wittenbergh gave me a link to his studio's portfolio page in Japanese, and a link to the style sheet that he uses to select font-families. He also linked me to a site that has some lists of fonts and screen shots (in Japanese) and an article on Japanese typography.

He also gave this valuable advice:

"Take care of character encoding, and be aware that MS Office uses some non-standard characters that only display fine in that browser (ahem)."

Asela also gave me lots of useful information and links:

As you may already know, Japanese font families are made of Mincho typefaces & Gothic typefaces (Very much like serif and sans-serif ). And Gothics are the best on screen since brushstroke based Mincho fonts shredded and blotted on screen.

Here is a great resource on Japanese typography:

• http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111
• http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?118

And here is a comparison chart Japanese of fonts & sizes on screen

Hope this would help, till IE figure out there problems on web standards. ;)

The choices are:

• Canon Powershot Pro1
• Konica Minolta DiMAGE A2

It's a hard one, and at the moment I am leaning on the Canon. It seems to have better image quality, even if it gets noise when using above 100 ISO.

Any pointers out there?

Where have I been?

After reading that Stuff and Nonsense do their initial concept mock ups in code rather than just graphic, I started asking myself "What is the best way to get clients to settle down with a concept? ". Coding mock ups could become extremely annoying if the client wont settle down to one concept, so Andy must have something in place to make sure that their time isn't going to waist.

Following on from my old posts (Mock Designing, and Mock Designing 2), I would now like to find out not how people mock design, but what rules they set with their client regarding this stage in the process.

Here is a list of the options as I see them:

• Keep doing mock ups until the client is happy with the result as part of the main cost.
• Limit the client to a maximum number of concept mock ups as part of the main cost.
• Charge per concept mock up, so that the client is encouraged to settle down with a concept as early as possible.

Which method do you use? And which method do you think would work best?

Happy Wubbing!

This is an ‘Ask the Audience' entry so you can all join in with a bit of feedback! If you cant be bothered to read it all, just go straight to the last sub heading.

Chatting to Duncan last week, in the Jacuzzi, about my next big project; Netring.co.uk ! We have wanted to do this since I started back in July, but other projects always need our attention. Things are a little quieter now (for how long we don't know), so we want to start looking in the mirror for a bit.

Edit: Since my first write of this, things have already gotten a bit busier, but we are still hoping to get this done within a reasonably amount of time.

This is how we expect the 'web standards tab' to look. Can anyone tell me to whome this link would be going?

Getting going

Hopefully a lot of readers will agree with me that the hardest projects to get going are the in-house projects, especially when you are in this line of work. ‘The shoe maker wears the worst shoes' as the saying goes!

Well, with time we have actually got started. I started on the design a good few weeks ago, and with tips from other designers made quite a few adjustments to my work. Then last week I started playing with it again, and few more light touched to the design and I have now started porting that into a HTML that will be used later on as the template. We will possibly be using ASP.net as a back end to the site for some of the more dynamic elements of what we want.

Not to much of that for now, but onto the reason why this entry is an ‘Ask The Audience' entry….

Supporting the Standards

One of the main reasons for the new site is obviously to bring it up to a more professional, and modern standard. The company is now trying its best to be meeting those standards in all its work, and the main let down is our website (Again with the Shoe Maker reference). Please don't look at our current portfolio. It is harsh to say the least!

One of the things that is included in ‘Supporting the Standards' though, is doing more than just using them. Trying to promote other people to use them, and to increase awareness amongst other organisations and companies as to what these strange ‘Web Standards' really are.

Completely by accident, we think we have found a neat little way to help towards this effect; by linking to all our favourite web standards advocate websites. This may or may not seem like a radical idea. If it does, then you may need to rethink your idea of radical ideas. However, we don't just plan on having a web standards page, with a bunch of links, no, we want to make is more interesting.

The Red Button Effect: “What does that do?”

You see, in our new navigation, we have some space; room for a small tab at the end of all our larger tabs. So what we plan on doing is including a link on every page that this navigation appears, to a web standard advocate site. It will be a random selection from an XML document containing all the web sites that we want to include; sites such as The Web Standards Project, or the Web Standards Awards. We are hoping that it will have what I call ‘The Red Button Effect'. When someone sees the big red button that is a little different to the rest of the page, what do they do?

What I want to ask you people is, who do you think should be included on such a list of web standards advocates sites?