Arabic-L:GEN:Front Page

Wed Jul 28 17:07:27 UTC 1999

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Arabic-L: Wed 28 Jul 1999
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject: Front Page Update

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1)
Date: 28 Jul 1999
From: greenman <greenman at zedat.fu-berlin.de>
Subject: Front Page Update

Hello again,

With the help of Paul Nelson at Microsoft, who monitors these lists and
has been kind enough to offer help on several occasions (including this
one), I seem to have found a workaround for my FrontPage 2000 problem.

A quick summary:

(1) I'm using FrontPage 2000 with Windows 95 English-Arabic and MS
Office English-Arabic

(2) When I wanted to edit the html source code of an English document
using FrontPage, the program "automatically" switched to Arabic!

What was happening:

When a blank page is opened - even before you type anything - if one
goes to the html view you see:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1256">

That means, for some reason, FP 2000 gratuitously opens any "new" page
with the Arabic code page (1256), and this "marks" the page for the rest
of its existence _unless_ you manually change the 1256 to 1252 (U.S.
English).

Also, when an "old" (i.e., previously written, previous saved) html
document is opened in FP2000, the program again - in the html source
view - identifies it as a 1256 document (though it does NOT add
"charset=windows-1256" to the html), and thus again automatically
switches to Arabic when you try to modify the source code!

The solution:

New document -> type a few English letters before going to the html
code. Then, when you go to the html code you'll see:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">

Now it's an English document. Save it and it stays that way.

Old document ->  When you open the document, add the line
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">
just below the <head> container, and then save the file. When you
re-open it, it doesn't jump back to Arabic!

This "solution" also solves another nasty problem. MS Internet Explorer
5 apparently also automatically looks for the code page. When FrontPage
sets it at 1256 in an English document, IE5 can't read the "fragment
identifiers": the links within a document that have # just before the
last element. FrontPage calls them  "bookmarks". Anyway, when you
specify the codepage 1252, voilá, IE5 goes to the proper link! (Netscape
doesn't have this problem.)

The question is now, what's telling FrontPage to identify / create the
Arabic code page? I'd guess it's the Arabic-English OS, and I believe
Mr. Nelson and friends will work on this one.

Though all this takes a few extra steps, it's a small price to pay for
elimination of the headaches.

Best regards from Berlin,
Joe

P.S. One positive note in all this is that by using FP2000 and
Arabic/English Windows 95 you can now more-or-less simply create
bi-lingual web pages (Arabic and English) that can be read by any
browswer that's 1256 capable.  The justification problem
(left/right/center for text and images) is a bit messy, but it's not
terrible. Of course, though, editing any English source code becomes a
problem again.
--
          **************  JOSEPH GREENMAN   *************
           Snail Mail: Togostr. 3, 13351 Berlin, GERMANY
                    Phone & Fax: +49 (0)30 451 95 33
          ****** MAILTO:greenman at zedat.fu-berlin.de *****
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End of Arabic-L: 28 Jul 1999