New on my site:
Will you be introducing some theory for pepople like me who don’t really understand too much about the difference between Big5/GB/Unicode/7-bit/8-bit/double-byte constructs and usage? Its all so confusing. Things never seem to work quite right when trying to do e-mails, make Web pages or whatever.
I doubt I’ll be adding anything about the theory and technical aspects of character encoding, as I find a lot of it confusing myself. 
I do, however, plan to include some practical information on including double-byte characters and tonal hanyu pinyin in Web pages. I’ve already added some to the notes for my tone numbers to tone marks converter. Like so much else, though, the situation is complicated by radically differing browser behaviors. And then there’s the problem of different operating systems.
I haven’t been able to test any of my pages on a Mac, which has been a source of worry for me. I’m especially curious how my test page for tonal pinyin in Unicode Web pages behaves on a Mac (hint, hint). An example of a page where tonal text is used is here: pinyin.info/readings/texts/c … tives.html
Doing this sort of thing was easier back when Microsoft allowed free downloading of its excellent Arial Unicode font.
Here is what it looks like in the latest version of Safari … Apple’s default Web browser for Mac OS X:
Thanks for the screen shot. I haven’t been using those particular code numbers, though, because on PCs only IE gets those right, as I noted in the text just above that chart.
The ones I’m most interested in are the [ul][li]Upper-case individually numbered entities (which should all work),[/li][li]Lower-case shifting diacritics (which should at least partially work), and [/li][li]Lower-case individually numbered entities (which should all work).[/li][/ul]
The tone marks are in the right place on Mozilla 1.5 on Windows.
In all of the charts or just certain ones? I would be surprised (but pleased) if the latest Mozilla gets everything right.
The test page uses a number of different methods for attempting to achieve what should be the same results. But some methods don’t work properly in some browsers.
In all of the charts or just certain ones? I would be surprised (but pleased) if the latest Mozilla gets everything right.[/quote]
Every character on the page pinyin.info/unicode/testpage.html has the correct tone marking in Mozilla 1.5 on Windows for me. Mozilla has improved quite quickly since 1.0.
I just looked at in Mozilla 1.4 (Win). You’re right: Everything works. 
Mozilla Firebird 0.7 (Win) also handles everything correctly.
Viva Mozilla!
What a shame Netscape gave up the ghost before getting this fixed.
Opera now gets it right, too. Opera 7.11 displays everything correctly on my Chinese XP system.
This is good. This is very good.
Hmm. Maybe some more testing is in order.
I just looked at the page with NN4.7, which definitely did not get everything right before but now it does. So maybe it’s the O/S that makes the difference.
for more information on using Chinese on the computer you can always check out my website : seba.ulyssis.org/thesis/