Languages and Blogger

Most posts are monolingual, and template should be optimised to handle the language of default posts. But what happens if you want to include more than one language in a post, or write a post in a language other than the default language of your blog.

When editing a blog post, Blogger provides a WYSIWYG Compose interface or alternatively a filtered HTML editing interface. The compose interface only allows a fairly limited number of fonts.

Additionally good web internationalisation practice requires change of language to be marked up. WCAG 1.0 (Level A) and WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) also require change in language to be indicated. The Compose interface does not provide a mechanism for marking up language change.

There are two approaches:

1. Use the HTML editing interface and add a lang and class attribute to a span or div element. The class attribute can be used to specify appropriate fonts.
2. Use the HTML editing mode to mark up change of language and modify the template CSS, adding language pseudo selectors, to provide language specific styling.

The second approach is the most extensible but versions of Internet Explorer before version 8 do not support language pseudo selectors. Although the ie7-js javascript library could be added to the blog's template to enable language pseudo selector support in pre-8.) versions of Internet Explorer.

Obviosuly this requires the user to have a lot of knowledge of HTML and CSS to do. So is it really necessary? For most languages it isn't necessary. Any language supported by Windows should be handled by Window's font linking mechanisms.

For unsupported languages, the situation is more complex. Opera and Firefox will attempt to switch fonts to display characters not available in the fonts specified in the stylesheet. This can result in an ugly, difficult to read ransom note effect.

Internet Explorer on the other hand will just attempt to use the fonts specfed in the stylesheet. If a character is unavailable in the font, the missing glyph symbol will be display. And considering Internet Explorer is the most common web browser it is necessary to consider Internet Explorer's display issues.

I'll use Ryōkan's (良寛) death poem as an example:

裏を見せ 表を見せて 散る紅葉
うらを見せ　おもてを見せて　散るもみじ

And a verse from a poem written, in Khartoum, by a friend:

Ca meth nhiaar apɛi
Go diët ɣa gɔc rot amɛtic
Ba ciët akɔ̈l kek puɔl
Ɣɛn athut aduɛɛr Malual.
Cï lec atur cï tuŋ ë pɛɛi.

In the case of the Japanese poem there is a complication involving Han Unification. If a Japanese font isn't specified for the text and the language of the text isn't indicated a web browser may default to using a non Japanese CJK font for displaying the text. Further information is available at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/results/results-lang-and-cjk-font

For the Dinka poem, if the stylesheet doesn't specify an appropriate font some of the letters may not display or the combining diacritics may not display correctly.

For lesser used languages that are not supported by Operating System Vendors care needs to be taken with setting up a blog and modifying the template for the font.