Unicode Characters

The Unicode Worldwide Character Standard, usually just referred to as Unicode, makes many more characters available that can be inserted in Web pages. The current standard, Unicode 3.0, potentially allows for the inclusion of over 49,000 Unicode characters, covering the main languages of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Asia, and the Pacific, as well as various sets of mathematical, technical, and other symbols. Characters from additional languages will be added as time goes by.

However, whether a particular Unicode character will display in your browser depends on whether you have a Unicode-supporting font installed on your system that includes that character. That you're able to view a particular Unicode character in your browser doesn't mean that someone else will be able to view the same character. For instance, if you have a Unicode-supporting Russian font installed on your system, you'll be able to view Cyrillic Unicode characters inserted in a Web page, but someone without a Unicode-supporting font installed that includes Cyrillic characters will not be able to view the same characters.

Setting the UTF-8 Character Set

For Netscape Navigator 4 users to see Unicode characters, you must set the document character set to UTF-8 (8-bit Unicode), and not ISO 8859-1. This will also increase the chances that Unicode characters will display in other browers. As shown previously, you declare that the document's character set is UTF-8 like this:

<head><title>Type your title here</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
</head>

Unicode Resources

There are a number of resources on the Web where you can find out more about using Unicode characters in your Web pages:

FIND IT ONLINE
Alan Wood's Unicode Resources page at www.alanwood.net/unicode/ —click the Characters link to view Unicode characters that are available on your system. Click the Fonts link to find Unicode-supporting fonts.
A. J. Flavell's Unicode Test Page at ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/ (click the "test tables" link).
The Unicode Consortium's Useful Resources page at www.unicode.org/unicode/onlinedat/resources.html —includes many links to sources of Unicode-supporting fonts.

To view an example Web page that displays the more commonly available Unicode fonts, open unicode.html from the resources folder in your MyHTML folder.

Since many older browsers do not provide support for displaying Unicode characters, another option for alerting visitors is the Invisible Object method that was demonstrated in the Sunday Afternoon session, "Working with Styles." Doing so will display an alert message and a link to a browser upgrade page to users of Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 3, for instance, but not to users of more recent browsers.