I am interested in translating Antville into Chinese, including menu and messages, but myself not a programmer. Can anyone give a clear idea of how to do so? Since Chinese use double-byte, which coding set should I use?

Have a look at the menu to the right, there's a link translate antville!; especially have a look at the story covering the basics.

Antville currently doesn't care about character encodings at all (at least my version, which is a few weeks old). That the German umlauts are working is rather a coincidence than the result of a carefully planned implementation.

If you're only interested in translating, but not in fixing this problem, I'd suggest you should just type away, send your translation in and let someone else figure out how to get it into Antville.

I'm not sure how support for Chinese should be implemented in Antville. For all languages we've been concerned with so far, we treated characters outside the ASCII set as HTML entities, e.g. we wrote å as å and ø as ø, which ensured only ASCII characters were transmitted to the browser. This can be done on a per blog basis and doesn't involve the Antville application per se, nor the Hop, nor the web server.

One possibility would be to treat Chinese characters the same way and transmit them as numerically encoded Unicode characters. This would benefit from the same advantages, but suffer from bloat: The transmitted pages would be blown up to a much bigger size.

Another possibility would be to transmit every page of a Chinese blog in an apropriate character encoding. But this encoding is not defined within an HTML page, but in the HTTP header. That means that it depends on the web server and we need to have a way to tell the web server for every page which encoding to use.

Maybe it is also possible to make the Hop generally use an encoding that allows for transmitting all Unicode characters all the time? Is there such an encoding? That way, we'd never have a problem with having to alter the HTTP header.