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Creating Bangla Websites- Joomla CMS |
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Special Needs for Bangla:
There are a few special needs for a website having Bangla contents.
- The first one is encoding of Bangla characters. Unicode is now the widely agreed upon encoding and so majority of CMS software support it. Unicode texts can be encoded in a number of possible encoding schemes: UCS-32 and UTF-8 are the main two.
- UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII and of variable length. English characters still need a single byte each, so all valid ASCII texts are valid UTF-8 texts. But each Bangla character needs three bytes of storage in UTF-8. And for conjunct characters this goes lot higher. For example, the letter khio needs a total of nine bytes! This has few implications that we will follow.
- The display of Bangla texts on viewers' computers needs some Bangla font. The operating system may already have one or two, if not they can be downloaded from the Internet and installed.
- All major browser software such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera can display Bangla texts if the host operating system has support for Unicode. Windows 2000, Windows XP and most GUI flavours of Linux have now support for Unicode. But the users often need to have the support installed. Sometimes the proper encoding may need to be set. Other times a preferred font can be set for better viewing.
- A software tool is required for inputting Bangla texts. There are a number of such tools varying from transliteration, IME to standard layout. Such software are called keyboard mapping software and mostly available on the Internet for free.
- As we are discussing about the full potential of a website in Bangla which would be meaningful to search engines and viewable across all W3C browsers, we would not be talking about any brute force means of just showing Bangla characters in web pages. That means, Bangla texts using GIF, PDF, ASCII coded EOT, Bitstream etc are of no merit in this letter.
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