Vietnamese Web Construction with Unicode

Vietnamese Web Page Construction

with VPSKeys, Unicode, and FrontPage

Abstract:

The Vietnamese language contains diacritical marks that would not display properly in a normal web page unless special techniques are applied in the design process. My favorite due to its versatility and simplicity, the VPSKeys - Unicode - FrontPage method is presented here. The procedure is a derivative of the information obtained from the Vietnamese Professionals Society's web site: www.vps.org

Application considerations:

Advantage: The web page viewer would not need any Vietnamese fonts, and the designer would not need any software other than Microsoft FrontPage 2000 (or 2002) and the free VPSKeys.

Disadvantage: Unicode fonts are included only in the Windows XP, 2000, ME, and 98 Second Edition operating systems, therefore Windows NT, 98 First Edition, 95, or 3.x users would not be able to view the Unicode fonts.

Procedure:

Download the free VPSKeys software from the Vietnamese Professionals Society's website: http://www.hcgvn.net/software/

Install the software onto a Windows XP, 2000, ME, or 98SE computer.

Activate the VPSKeys application then open its configuration utility by clicking on its icon at the lower right-hand corner of the display.

Configure VPSKeys to use the Unicode font standard: From the Kỹ Thuật (Technical) tab's Sửa Bảng Mã (Edit Font Standard) menu, select the :Unicode item.

In Microsoft FrontPage, select only Unicode fonts such as: Arial, Courier New, Tahoma, Times New Roman, or Verdana, for your web page construction.
To ensure proper display even if the automatic encoding feature of a visitor's web browser was unavailable or compromised, add the following lines or meta tags to the <head> section of the web page's HTML code, replacing similar meta tags as necessary:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="vi">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

The first meta tag sets the web page's language to Vietnamese (abbreviated as "vi").

The second meta tag sets the web page's character set to ISO-8859-1 or Latin 1 which contains definitions for displaying all the Vietnamese characters.

Notes:

For example, our web page "Thơ Ông Ðồ" was constructed with the above procedure.

The implementation had been successfully tested for clients with:

	Internet Explorer 5 on Windows 98SE platform.
	Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Professional, 2000 Advanced Server and Professional, NT 4.0 Server, 98SE platforms.

Have fun,