Character Encoding - What you Must know

[Snowhog]

Interesting. The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

[HalationEffect]

Somewhat off-topic, and I realise that the page linked to is 10 years old, but gawd I hate reading narrow, fixed-width web pages on a 16:9 monitor. All that wasted space!

[Goeroeboeroe]

It is a bit old, but it's still the way things work today. The biggest difference: in htlm5 <meta charset="utf-8"> is enough.
This is a newer article, but it has about the same content: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2...haracter-sets/
For really good articles it takes a lot of time to get too old.

Off-topic: @HalationEffect: if you don't use fixed-width columns, pages, or something like that, you get very, very long lines on wide screens. Very long lines are extremely difficult to read. There's a solution in css3 with automatic columns, but you have to scroll from the bottom of the first column back to the top of the second column, etc. That's only usable for very short pieces of text. Things that do work like flexbox are not yet supported in enough browsers.

[GreyGeek]

While writing code using Qt I used the tr() function, from the "translation" class.
http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_...l/qt/i18n.html

For example, assuming LoginWidget is a subclass of QWidget:

 
    LoginWidget::LoginWidget()
    {
        [URL="http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/qt/qlabel.html"]QLabel[/URL] *label = new [URL="http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/qt/qlabel.html"]QLabel[/URL]( tr("Password:"), this );
        ...
    }

For a long time I wondered what the abbreviation "i18n" meant. I learned that it was shorthand for "internationalization", which has 18 characters between the first "i" and the last "n".

Anyway, using Qt's tr() function made cake out of language problems. One of the tools that comes with Qt is the Qt Linguist:
http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_...st-manual.html
which supplied a template which can be used by a native speaker to create, for example, his native word for "password". During installation of the program if there is more than the default English language in the Linquist's templates then a dialog is thrown up asking the user to choose the preferred language.

[HalationEffect]

Off-topic: @HalationEffect: if you don't use fixed-width columns, pages, or something like that, you get very, very long lines on wide screens. Very long lines are extremely difficult to read.

I've heard that argument before, and yet Wikipedia, which uses all the width of whatever screen you view it on, isn't difficult to read at all (for me, at least). I very much prefer the way they display their pages. Or indeed, this very forum!

[Goeroeboeroe]

I see what you mean. But I'm afraid that's never gonna be solved for you, because most of the people don't like such long lines. That's a disadvantage of Internet: you make things the way most people like it. And if you happen to be one of the few people that can read (very) long lines without problems, I'm afraid you'll be in bad luck most of the time. Even with the newest css etc. In the guidelines on accessibility from w3c, wcag, etc. long lines are explicitly discouraged. You must have very good eye coordination or something like that!
If you use Firefox (possibly other browsers have things like this too), you can find extensions to disable css. If you disable css on the page Snowhog linked too, you get almost the same lay-out, but with long lines. This will work on most well coded pages with (almost) only text and images. Than you can have long(er) lines with just one click or key shortcut. But that page is indeed very narrow, even for ten years ago.

[HalationEffect]

I honestly can't understand why long lines would be discouraged in the guidelines - people who don't like long lines aren't being forced to run their browsers at the maximum width of their displays, after all. Making all pages have dynamic width can work for everyone, whereas fixed width *only* works for those who prefer shorter lines.

I guess I have been blessed with really good vision, even though it has deteriorated a little thanks to middle age... but I can't really complain, as the deterioration has been from 6:3 to 6:4 (20:10 to 20:13 for our American friends).

[Goeroeboeroe]

It's not that simple with fixed width etc. First the reason: most people have trouble going back to the right line if lines are too long. If it's really nonsense you notice you start with the wrong line, but even than it's annoying looking for the right line to continue reading. And when you skip a line but the text seems logical, it takes some time to notice you skipped one (or more) lines.
There are different numbers, depending who you believe, but a line should not contain more as 50-100 characters. (For most people.) So if I control that with my browser, I have to set it on 50-100 characters wide. That's very small. And I have to adjust that very often, because lots of sites have images beside the text etc. On my own site I use about 100 characters (normal font-size.)
When browsers support new things like flexbox, grid, etc., you can use the whole screen. But even then I'm afraid linelength will not be longer on most sites.
But maybe this will make you a bit happy: I write tutorials on building sites. This is the very first time I saw a complain about too short lines. (Too long lines is a pretty common complaint.) I'll keep your remark in the back of my head, because maybe sometimes it is possible to let the user choose for (very) long lines, without too much effort.

[HalationEffect]

I think the main issue I have isn't too-short lines... it's that too many sites neglect to use so much horizontal space. They do (to my mind) stupid things like wasting precious vertical space with site navigation menus, etc., rather than putting them on one or both sides (again, much like Wikipedia does).

I keep reading about how "responsive web design" is all the rage nowadays, but I don't see as many examples of it as I'd like to.