Do you display Chinese on your website? If so you need to read an understand this.

Are Your Users Able To Read Chinese? Fonts?

So you're carrying content in Chinese, and users should be able to view this. For some of your users, Chinese may show up as '??' or ˹, or some other gibberish. If so this is because your users cannot correctly view the font (or encoding you use). The main tip here would be don't specify Chinese fonts as the user's browser probably doesn't have that many available, if you specify one that they don't have their browser may very well not be able to display anything other than "˹˹˹˹˹˹˹˹". Maybe Simsum looks cool, but how many of your readers have taken the time to download many different Chinese fonts?

Many sites in China, focussed on English speakers, may have their content in English but provide handy addresses/namecards in Chinese. In many cases, viewers of such websites may have a low Chinese ability, a low IT ability, and not installed even a single Chinese font. Their computers are incapable of displaying any Chinese text at all! If contact info is intended for someone that indeed may not be interested in installing Chinese fonts on their computer (and for English language 'Informational'/'Community Sites' these people may be numerous) stick all of the Chinese into a picture, so it no longer depends on fonts and is 100% readable by any computer. This is important.

Encoding Options

Do you know what UTF-8, gb2312 or BIG-5 are? In short: all text has an encoding; English typically uses ASCII which represents the English alphabet, number system and a few other things like punctuation marks and funky squiggles. ASCII cannot display Chinese. Notice this is in reference to the output of a webpage; some software can perform internal transformations changing an input encoding to a different output encoding.

• BIG-5 is an encoding system for Traditional Chinese characters as used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It actually encodes characters in a partial form but that is a subject in itself. Check the bottom of this post for links explaining this.
• gb2312 is an encoding system for Simplified Chinese characters, used in mainland China and perhaps Singapore. It has actually been superceeded but remains in common use. There are other GBs, but they retain this as a subset, and GBs retain ASCII as a subset too.
• UTF-8 stands for Unicode Transformation Concept and is a way for characters of all languages to be transmitted/encoded in the same format (if a browser only supports ACSII, it is absolutely unable to display anything other than English, but with UTF-8 it can display almost all languages)
• UTF-16 it exists but I will not cover it other than saying it is slightly more efficient than UTF-8 for Chinese content, but less efficient for English language content. Rare to find a website in UTF-16 anywhere in the world.

There are a load of other encoding options too. So many. But these are the main ones when talking about China.

Today there's no hard-and-fast rule for one encoding and traditional vs. simplified font display, it's just how the system developed with the lack of a unifying standard. Transformation from simplified to traditional, or particularly tradittional characters can be tricky, as sometimes a single simplified character may map to multiple traditional characters.

Practicality

So... with all of these encoding options, which to choose?

The simple answer would be unicode, or UTF-8 (but MAKE SURE your users have the fonts installed, or otherwise use pictures to display Chinese words).

The more complex answer is... more complex. This site aggregates things on Chinalyst.net. Chinalyst seems not to support Chinese through its feeds. In a case like this, there really is nothing one can do, Chinese gets output as '??'. If another site quotes you and they're ASCII based they cannot display your Chinese content, no matter what the encoding; if a site with one encoding directly quotes a site with another codng, things get confusing. It's consider a mobile phone user in China - does their mobile phone/GPRS/mapping/whatever support UTF-8? It may do, but if it doesn't, you are equally screwy. If you're developing an application for the Chinese domestic market, there seems little harm developing it in GB form, precisely because of these mobile phone/PDA issues. Weighing this up against delivering content in another UTF-8 supported language (Arabic, for example), has the disadvantage f not being able to display that language correctly in GB format; a multilingual site would be administratively much simpler if using UTF-8.

Ideally, these problems would have been thought of ahead of time. They were not. It seems best to use UTF-8 for a general purpose global site that features Chinese, but if you're creating a website that focuses on the mainland China domestic market with content in Chinese, then GB may be the best choice.

'Issues'

Find it tragically funny when things go wrong? Check out John's upgrade post. The principal is... make sure any upgrade being performed is actually the thing one expects to happen. In this case MySQL was somewhat less than truthful about what it was doing (4.0xx was not fully UTF-8 enabled), and the connection between his Wordpress and MySQL installations was ironically 'lost in translation'. The principal is sound: if you want to implement any standard, make sure it's implemented not only on the output page, but at any point in the process.

Links For The Geeky
Big-5
GB 2312
Unicode and UTF-8