Displaying International Fonts and Characters on the Web

How do you display web content in languages other than English?

The quick answer is to use unicode. Unicode is a standard that includes character representations encompassing all living languages.

When using unicode, appropriate fonts have to be available on each viewer's computer. Otherwise, the unicode characters won't be rendered. You can test which unicode characters are available on your system – unknown characters show up as rectangles or squares rather than characters.)

There are also additional factors to consider. Details...

Wikis

One of my big projects at work right now is refining the user interface for a wiki service at Ohio State.

A wiki is a kind of website that allows users to add and edit content collectively (read more about wikis), so it's important to make it easy for visitors to understand what they are allowed to do. It's also important to our users who set up their own wiki spaces in our service to change the interface to show their own personalities.

I started my interface improvements by activating several theme add-ins written by other people for the wiki software. These themes offer variety so all the wiki spaces don't have to look exactly the same. Here's an example of one that let's space owners change the background color:

I've also been working with a templating language called Velocity to restructure the wiki's introduction page, or Dashboard. Because we offer wiki space to a lot of unrelated projects, the list of recent changes for all wikis that normally appears isn't very helpful!

Sending HTML Email

Earlier this week, I wrapped up an HTML-formatted newsletter project. It was challenging because every email reader renders HTML slightly differently.


Also, the type of HTML that works in email differs from what's typically written for the web. Here are some of the big differences:

• Images displayed in HTML email are stored on a webserver and read remotely by the message recipient. That means files paths to the images have to absolute paths, like a link to an external website.


• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) works differently, too. Usually, CSS files are external to a page, but inline styles are needed for HTML email.


• Also, only a limited set of CSS selectors work reliably in HTML email. Margins, padding, and other positioning settings fail. Unfortunately, this means arranging elements of the page has to be done the old-fashioned way -- with HTML tables.

The biggest lesson I learned is that even a simply formatted HTML-email template like this one requires a lot of testing.

How I Spent My Vacation

Last week, I met up with a college friend to attend South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas. In addition to enjoying good food, great conversation, and a trip to the LBJ Presidential Library to see animatronic LBJ, I attended sessions on teamwork in web design, designing user-focused sites, and whether video games have a place in higher education.


Three observations:

• Great web development comes from teamwork--even "famous" web designers are surrounded by colleagues they respect and rely on.


• All web developers, no matter their location or who they work for, struggle to get content from their clients.


• All website owners struggle to understand who is visiting their site and why.

Although these may not seem like earth-shattering revelations, it was comforting to realize that corporate web professionals experience the same general conditions as those of us in universities and non-profits.

Eliciting Participation in Collaborative Content Design

In October, I presented a poster at the HighEd WebDev conference in Rochester, NY to share how my colleagues and I collaborated to develop content in three recent web/information projects.


Here's a summary:

• For one of the projects, we used a wiki to co-write the content and edit each other's drafts. This method allowed everyone a chance to see how the site was forming and add any information they had.


• For another project, pairs of people arranged keywords to help define the focus of a site.


• For the third project, we gathered as many people as possible to test a new software system and make notes about updates needed to the old online help pages. This would have taken the usual documentation team a month to complete, but having everyone help sped up the process and gave us a wider perspective about what was and wasn't working.

See more details. (pdf)

Launching the Site

Well, after months of planning and development, we finally launched the new site. It features a home page with space for news and announcements, an RSS feed of news and events, clearly labeled services and site navigation, and a bright, shiny new look!

Coding and Testing the Site

After a few tweaks to the design, I've begun building the site in HTML and CSS. Because different web browsers sometimes show pages differently, I'm testing each change I make to ensure I don't break what I've already done.

The hardest thing right now is aligning some navigation links that run along the top of the page -- it's a tight fit and I want to be sure they don't shift around and create gaps when the page is resized.

If you are interested in how CSS is used to make websites, here's a link to visit:

W3 Schools - CSS Examples

Sorry this is so short...I have a lot of work to do!