Duncan, if you don’t mind, I have another question. How does Sparkle handle multilingual sites that have a mixture of English and 2-byte text like Japanese?
For English, web fonts are great. For Japanese, it’s more complex because unless you are using KATAKANA or HIRAGANA alone (each about 50 characters), you simply aren’t going to find a KANJI (chinese character) web font because it would have to hold thousands of characters and be a huge download. So what I do in Freeway is create font styles for Japanese that ensure the basic text is a gothic font (similar to helvetica) and is a font common to Windows or the Mac (MS PGothic for older Windows and Meiryo font for newer Windows, along with the Mac versions like Hiragino).
I also have a link on every page in my site to allow the user seamless switching between English and Japanese. You can see that on one of my sites here:
Click the ENGLISH button at right of the menubar and then you can click JAPANESE to get back. And as you dig down into the site you still have the same buttons. And unlike other sites that merely take you to the top page when you click the language button, my site offers you the language swap of the very page you are on at the time.
So obviously, I would want do achieve the same on any new websites I build with a Freeway alternative like Sparkle.
Thank you,
James Wages
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