From Jennifer Kyrnin,
Your Guide to Web Design / HTML.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

If you're trying to create a site that caters to non-English speakers, you need to be able to use languages other than English. Note for advanced readers, this article is not going to address the needs of double-byte languages such as Japanese or Chinese. This is meant as an overview of special characters within the Latin-1 character set.

English and HTML

HTML was developed in English. Many pages are written in English, but that doesn't mean that you can't write pages in other languages. It's easy to write pages that use a similar alphabet to English, called the Latin-1 character set. This includes languages such as:

• English
• French
• Spanish
• German

Using Special Characters

But standard English doesn't include accented characters, letters with tildes or umlauts, and ligatures (two letters smashed together). So, how do you use languages that do have those characters? HTML has an encoding system that allows you to display these characters even if they aren't right on your keyboard.

One common problem that occurs on non-English pages is that the non-English characters, such as Á and ñ are displayed using computer codes. For many people viewing the page, this doesn't appear to be a problem. The Á and ñ display correctly, as long as they are using the same type of computer. For example, my co-worker has written pages for our French Canada site that look correct on his Mac and my Mac, but when we look at them on my PC strange characters appear.

This is because the Web page content was written in Microsoft Word. Then the text was copied and pasted directly into the HTML. Word uses codes to define the special characters, but these codes are different across systems. But if you convert those codes to HTML codes, they will display correctly on the Web.

Character Codes

Here are some of the non-English Latin-1 characters, and the special codes used in HTML to write them:

• Czech and Slovak
• French
• German
• Polish
• Russian - Cyrillic
• Spanish
• Turkish
• All HTML Codes

HomeSite Script

When I work with French, Spanish, and Portuguese Web pages I paste the text into HTML written in HomeSite. Then I use a script from scripts.hsguide.com to convert the page's special characters to HTML characters. You can download that script (and many others) here: http://scripts.hsguide.com/scripts.php3. I use the script called spcharrep.js - hold down the shift key as you click to download the script.

Previous Features