"Your server cannot support the language that my web page is written in."

We sometimes get requests from clients, asking us to install a certain language in our server so that their web page can be properly displayed.

Take for example, their web page might contain Chinese characters. But after they uploaded the web page to the server, the web page cannot display the Chinese characters properly.

A possible cause is that the web page has been uploaded in ASCII mode. If the web page is uploaded in BINARY mode, the web page should display properly.

Web pages containing characters like Chinese characters need to use "double-byte" characters. A single byte character is not enough to display all the characters available in the Chinese language, for example. Thus, a double-byte character is needed. (English has 26 letters, upper case, lower case, numbers, and a number of symbols and punctuations. Chinese for example, has thousands of characters.) Double-byte characters will be "lost" when they are transferred in ASCII mode.

The above is just a very simplified explanation. A full description of how different language characters are being displayed is beyond the scope of this article.

Last but not least, whether a different language can (or cannot) be displayed also depends on the visitor's computer. If the visitor did not install certain "Language Packs" in his/her computer, his/her computer will not be able to display the characters of different languages.

Can your computer display the characters below? If yes, most probably, your computer already has the needed language pack installed.

If you can't see the above, it means that your computer is not installed with the necessary language pack to display those characters. For the benefit of those whose computer cannot display those characters, we did a screen capture and put it below. It's Japanese and Hebrew.