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by lmm 1201 days ago
I don't know about HTML specifically; I meant spans as a general concept rather than a literal <span> tag. If the web stack has actually implemented mixing languages on the same page to the point where you can use it in a "normal" application then that's very cool (and if they've done it with their lang tags rather than by allowing mixed encodings, well, fine), but I've yet to see a site that actually has that up and running.
1 comments
Symbiote 1201 days ago
I can't read it, but there will be hundreds of articles on Japanese Wikipedia covering Chinese literature etc that have text in both languages, all in Unicode.
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lmm 1201 days ago
Had a look, they have a macro for it. Cool!
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Symbiote 1201 days ago
Also,

  <html lang="ja">
    Japanese text ... 
    <span lang="zh">
      Chinese quote
    </span>
    ... 
  </html>
is much easier than mixing encodings. With the above entirely in Unicode, it will be handled reliably by anything that can handle Unicode, and is still reasonably readable even if the Chinese text is shown in a Japanese font. Reading just the fourth line without the third will still show something 'OK'.

Mixing Shift_JIS and Big5 sounds like a recipe for corruption, but something similar was done in an old Russian and Japanese encoding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_Out_and_Shift_In_charact...

RFC 2482 was a Unicode adaptation of this, but it was deprecated 12 years ago: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6082.html

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