With Microsoft FrontPage you can author and edit pages in a language other than your computer's default language. This makes it easy for you to collaborate with authors who create pages in different languages, and create international web sites..
Initially, the default settings for web sites and pages are based on the default language that is set for your computer. However, Microsoft FrontPage allows you to set alternative language setting for your web site, individual pages, and specific text. This topic provides an overview of the concepts, and FrontPage features useful for creating pages in different languages and encodings.
Overview
When your operating system is installed on your computer, you can determine the default language to be used by applications running on the computer. This default language determines both the keyboard language and the system code page, a HTML encoding used by applications that run on your computer. System code pages and encodings can apply to several languages. For example, computers in the US and Western Europe use the encoding Windows-1252, this encoding contains a large number of languages (English, German, Spanish, French, and so on).
When you create new web pages, FrontPage determines the encoding and language of new pages from your keyboard's language setting. The encoding tells FrontPage how to store the information in a file. Any characters that are not part of the current encoding are stored as Unicode numeric character references (such as AC;). Unicode numeric character references make the file larger and hamper the readability of your HTML code. The following HTML tag specifies a page's encoding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
The language of a page does not affect how information is stored, but rather tells FrontPage which spelling dictionary to use to proof pages and text. It also helps Web browsers determine in which font to display the page and helps search engines identify the language of a page. The following HTML tag specifies a page's language:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
You can set the language of specific text on a page, to ensure FrontPage loads the correct spelling dictionary for proofing that text. For example, if the page is marked as English, but will contain some Japanese text, you can select the text and mark it as Japanese. Then change your language keyboard setting to Japanese and type the text you want. When you proof the web site, FrontPage will automatically load the Japanese spelling dictionary for the Japanese text, and the English dictionary for the English text. The following HTML tag specifies a page's language:
<span lang="ja" &12354; </span>
Note For FrontPage to automatically load the correct spelling dictionary you need to install the Microsoft Office XP Multilingual User Interface Pack or Microsoft Office Proofing Tools for the languages you want to use in a web site. In addition, you must enable support for each language through Microsoft Office Language Settings.
Creating web pages in a different language, using the same encoding
The following information describes FrontPage options that enable you to work with different languages in a web site:
Specify what language the FrontPage Server Extensions should use to display messages
You can specify what language the FrontPage Server Extensions should use for displaying messages. Some server messages may be displayed to you while you are editing the page. Other messages are displayed to site visitors, such as a search failure message or a form validation warning. The FrontPage Server Extensions also generate HTML that the site visitor will see, such as the default confirmation page and other pages for form failures based on this language setting. So, if the language is set to English but you think the majority of your site visitors will be German, you can choose German as the language used by the server extensions.
Specify the interface language of FrontPage
The FrontPage interface is displayed in the same language as the computer's default language or in the language of FrontPage that you purchased. Templates, wizards, and server extensions messages are also displayed in this language. To display a different language for the FrontPage interface, and make wizards and templates available in that language, you can purchase a version of FrontPage in that language, or your corporation can purchase the Microsoft Office XP Multilingual User Interface Pack that contains tools to enable you to change the language of the user interface and Help in Microsoft Office programs.
Change the page language
When you author a page in a different language, you'll want to ensure that other Web browsers and search engines can identify your pages' language and display them correctly. In addition, you should specify the language for a pages to ensure FrontPage scan check spelling and save pages correctly. Therefore, if a page should not use the default setting specify the exact language of individual pages.
Change the default spelling language
You can specify the default spelling language that FrontPage should use to proof any pages that are not marked with a specific language. For example, web pages created in Notepad. FrontPage will check the spelling for those pages according to the default spelling language setting.
Set the web site's default page encoding
The default page encoding is set for each web site , and is used by FrontPage to specify the initial encoding for new pages, if it's compatible with current keyboard. If the encoding is not compatible with the keyboard, the keyboard's encoding is used instead. However, you can choose to ignore the keyboard's encoding, and FrontPage will compare the default page encoding to that of your computer instead.
Warning Setting the default page encoding to <none> is not recommended because users would have to set the page encoding for each individual new page. Otherwise special characters not contained in the basic ASCII character set, such as the euro character, might not be displayed correctly.
Set the encoding for saving pages
By default, FrontPage uses the page encoding indicated by your keyboard, or the web site's (or computer's) default encoding, to determine in what character set to save new pages. However, if characters on a page are primarily in a different character set than the default page encoding, you can specify a different encoding for saving an individual page.
Other options
You can specify the default fonts that are displayed in FrontPage for each character set to match the default font in your Web browser. The default font is displayed when no other font has been applied to text. You can specify both a proportional font and a fixed-width font (displayed on the HTML tab) for most character sets.
If a page is not being displayed correctly because its encoding is not marked in the HTML code, you can specify its correct encoding for reloading the page.
URL Limitations
Internet standards only permit the use of plain ASCII characters in URLs. To ensure that all site visitors can follow URLs regardless of their computer language or operating system, you should also use plain ASCII characters in the URLs for your web sites. For this reason, whenever you create a new web site, folder, or file, FrontPage suggests a name with plain characters. On intranets, using non-ASCII characters in a file name will work as long as the server and all clients share the same system code page.
The version of Internet Explorer that is included with FrontPage has begun to send international URLs in Unicode (UTF-8). URLs in Unicode can be understood by Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 4.0 or later. If your web is on an intranet and you can control both the client and server software, you might be able to use international URLs.