April 24, 2004

u.s. hispanics prefer english news?

i was a bit surprised by the results of a Pew Hispanic Center survey reported by CNN. it seems a majority of u.s. hispanics actually prefer to get their news from english language sources. CNN's quoting the report as saying "over time immigrant Latinos steadily migrate from Spanish to English media". sorts of takes some of the wind out of the sails of one my reasons for going the G11N route in web developement, the u.s.'s "backyard" spanish speaking market though that doesn't belay the fact that companies are still spending dough on non-english advertizing. something i guess i should look into some more.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 2:10 AM 0 comments

April 18, 2004

seiyaku.com is born!

i dare you to find a more specialized i18n website than seiyaku.com. its a site devoted to "Western style weddings in Japan" (apparently a highly popular way to get hitched in japan these days) and was recently cleaved from tex texin's i18nGuy website. there's some other interesting stuff on that site including 六曜 or rokuyo (lucky/unlucky days of the japanese calendar). cool.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 10:27 AM 0 comments

April 17, 2004

enable unicode dsn option's secret revealed

let me first ask what you think this label means, Enable Unicode for data sources configured for non-Latin characters? if you're like me, you'd probably think it meant that enabling this puppy would force the db driver (sql server in my case) to use Unicode for all text to/from the database. and as it turns out you (and me) would be wrong. now let me backtrack a bit and explain that with sql server you'd normally use unicode hinting--the "N" in N'test'-- to let the db know that a particular chunk of text is actually Unicode. so if you understood Enable Unicode as to actually enable unicode you might be tempted to not use Unicode hinting in your cf sql code. and of course you'd garbage your text data as a result. you might be asking why i'd never picked up this before now (heck blackstone's just around the corner)? because i'm what some folks might call nutso about Unicode, i always go the extra mile in dealing with Unicode--i always use Unicode hinting even when i enabled the Unicode option for a given dsn. so this is an issue i'd never noticed before. so what exactly does Enable Unicode enable? why it controls how the cfqueryparam deals with Unicode text. if you turn it on, cfqueryparam handles Unicode text correctly. turn it off and cfqueryparam turns your Unicode text into a mound of garbage. let me thank figleaf's steve drucker for bringing this issue up in first place (in the forums) and mm's hiroshi okugawa for digging up an mx 6.0 box to test that Enable Unicode has always worked this way. so now you know.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 11:11 PM 0 comments

April 08, 2004

another draft W3C i18n tutorial: Using language information in XHTML, HTML and CSS

the W3C folks have released another i18n tutorial, this one deals with providing language information. it aims to cover these objectives: -guidelines for declaring the language of documents and text -how to specify language attribute values -applicability of the language tag to apply language-specific CSS styling -a brief introduction to the concept of server-based language negotiation well worth the read.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 11:25 AM 0 comments