Browsing the Japanese Web In English

Q: I've heard that the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer will let me read and write Japanese on the Net.Is that true and, if so, what do I need to do to enable this capability?

A: It's partially true. With English (or any other language) Windows 95 or NT 4.0 and version 3.0 of Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can indeed read Japanese Web pages. You cannot however, input Japanese kanji. (To do that with English-language Windows, you'll need a solution like Kanji Kit. See "Doing Japanese in English Windows" in our August issue, page 28.) Neither does the viewing capability of IE 3.0 extend to reading Japanese in e-mail or newsgroups; so far, it works only for Web pages.

To enable your English Internet Explorer to view a Japanese Web page, you simply need to download and install the aptly-named Japanese Language Support Kit for Microsoft Internet Explorer. This free add-on is available from Microsoft's Web site, but it can be a bit difficult to locate, so we'll lay out the steps here.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/ie/download/, and click on the down arrow at the right of the download box. From the drop-down list that appears, select "Additional Features & Add-ons," then click the Next button.

This takes you to the IE Additional Components page. Click on the arrow at the right of the download box, select "IE Multilanguage Support" from the drop-down list, and click Next.

Then, from the Download Area page, select "Japanese - IE Multilanguage Support for Windows 95 and NT 4.0" and again click on Next. You'll be offered a choice of numerous download sites; click on any of the these to start downloading the 2.5MB ie31pkja. exe file.

After you have saved the file to your hard disk, double click to install it. (Installation is fully automatic.) After a few seconds, you'll be instructed to restart your computer to complete the installation. When this is done, and you next load Intern et Explorer, you'll discover a new icon in the lower-right corner that, when clicked, offers you the choice of Western, Japanese Auto Select, JIS, EUC, or SJIS encoding.

With the Japanese Language Support Kit installed, you can view Japanese Web pages with your English Windows 95 and IE 3.0. There is no documentation or help file with it, but you won't need them. The "Japanese (Auto Select)" setting will serve most of the time, but if a page comes up with garbage characters instead of kanji, click on the new icon and cycle through the Japanese encoding options (EUC, JIS, and SJIS) until you find the proper one. (You may have to reload the current page.)

If you need to be able to display other languages, Microsoft provides support kits for Chinese (traditional and simplified), Korean, and Pan-European languages as well. These can be added to your English Internet Explorer along with Japanese, and our brief tests have shown the various language kits to coexist peacefully and cause little or no degradation of Internet Explorer's performance.

In the battle of the browsers between Microsoft and Netscape, there are strengths and weaknesses on both sides. When it comes to integrating the capability to easily read Japanese on a purely English-language system, though, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 has scored a clear victory over Navigator 3.0.

Thanks to Kenneth Morse, director of Far East product development for Comshare, Inc., for his suggestions on this topic.

Advice for Web page authors

If you have the encoding method set to Auto Select (for Internet Explorer) or Auto Detect (for Navigator) but a Japanese Web page doesn't display properly, don't fault the browser. Even the best kanji code detection routine can fail on occasion (such as because of an overlap in SJIS/EUC codes).

If you're a homepage author, you can help Web surfers avoid this problem by explicitly notifying the browser which encoding scheme you have used. The trick to doing this when creating a Japanese Web page is to add a single line of HTML code (usually directly after the <title> line). To identify the page as using the Shift-JIS character set, for example, you would insert the line <meta http-equiv="ContentType" content="text/html; charset=x-sjis">. For JIS or EUC encoding, replace the "charset=x-sjis" portion of this line with "charset=iso-2022-jp" or "charset=x-euc-jp," respectively.