This section describes how to create a Chinese HTML document in Big5 encoding and publish it on the Apache server.
Chinese Web pages should use UTF-8 encoding. But for some reason, if you have to use Big5 encoding for your Chinese Web pages.
you should enter Chinese characters with Big5 encoding and set the "charset" attribute to "big5".
Here is a simple test I did on my local system:
1. Run my Chinese text editor that supports Big5 encoding.
2. Enter the following HTML document:
<html>
<!-- Hello-Big5.html
Copyright (c) 2007 by Dr. Herong Yang, http://www.herongyang.com/
-->
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=big5"/>
<body>
<b>Chinese characters in Big5</b><br/>
Simplified characters: ??????<br/>
</body>
</html>
You see some question marks (?) in the source code listed above, because
this book uses UTF-8 encoding. Big5 encoded characters can not be included here.
3. Save the as Hello-Big5.html in Big5 encoding.
On my Chinese text editor, I had to select "Big5 text file" as the "Save as type" to ensure my document was saved in Big5 encoding.
Like many other Chinese text editors, it supports multiple encodings. If you are not careful, the document could be saved with a wrong encoding.
4. Copy Hello-Big5.html to \local\apache\htdocs.
5. Now run Internet Explorer (IE) with http://localhost/Hello-Big5.html.
You should see Chinese characters displayed correctly:
This proves that my Chinese editor, the Web server: Apache, and the Web browser: IE, all worked correctly
with Chinese characters in Big5 encoding.
