Hi,

First off, I want to say that I like this idea a lot.

I want to question the need for this:

Character encoding conversion of HTML output fom UTF-8 to Shift_JIS
Character encoding conversion of $_POST from Shift_JIS to UTF-8

I am not going to pretend that I know more about this than you when it comes to Japanese mobile browsers, but can they not handle UTF-8?

Also, can you recommend a good emulator for most common browsers in Japan. I installed the Fire Mobile Emulator for FireFox, but I can say it's not great.

I hope you get back to me.

Thanks,

Shaun

Comments

jajathejazzcat’s picture

jajathejazzcat CreditAttribution: jajathejazzcat commented

Hi Shaun. Thanks for your comment.

There are 2 problems with using UTF-8.

The first one is that au doesn't say they support utf-8 on their website. There are some reports on the Internet that some au phones don't support utf-8, though I'm not sure which ones. It's safe to keep using shift-jis until au declares support of utf-8.

The second problem is that the Docomo and Softbank's official emulators don't display utf-8. I know they are quite old and don't reflect the capability of recent phones, but I still use them for checking which html tags and css attributes can be used on mobile phones. It's like using the lowest common denominator, but you can be quite sure that your website can be displayed on most devices if it can be displayed on the old emulators.

Regarding the emulator, I think the Fire Mobile Emulator still uses Firefox engine for rendering html and don't reflect the limited capability of mobile phones. There were a few incidents in the past when my website was displayed correctly on Fire Mobile but didn't work on actual phones. I just use the combination of User Agent Switcher for Firefox and the carriers' official emulators for development. Like you said, we need a browser-based emulator that exactly behaves like actual phones.

Bensbury’s picture

Bensbury CreditAttribution: Bensbury commented

I'm working for a Japanese web design company in Tokyo.
While au and softbank are considered okay with utf-8, they pretty much stick to j-shift when dealing with docomo and docomo has the biggest market share.

We have a ton of test phones, and the docomo phones don't play nicely with utf-8.