or 
All pages on this site that include Esperanto, Romanized Chinese, or Chinese Characters are encoded in Unicode, the international standard for representing virtually all non-Roman or enhanced Roman writing systems on computers. Recent versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, and other browsers should display these correctly if you have the necessary type fonts. In most cases, appropriate fonts come with the system. Most pages will automatically switch to the correct coding system. If they don't, you can reset the coding manually under the browser's "view" menu.
I have generally defaulted to Microsoft's Times New Roman type font for general purposes and PMingLiU and SimSun for Chinese characters because of their clarity and large character sets. In the event that characters do not display correctly (and that you care), you can pick up the necessary fonts on the Microsoft or Apple sites if you thrash around clicking things long enough.
There is a good chance that you already have have Chinese fonts on your computer, but that you need to activate them. For Windows, go to "Settings / Control Panel / Regional and Language Options" and click on things till it works. If you wish to input Chinese, go to "Settings / Control Panel / Keyboard" and mess around till it does what you want.
On PCs, Microsoft has designated "Arial Unicode MS" as a typefont continuously enlarged to contain all characters in the latest official version of the Unicode Standard. It's not beautiful, since it must be spaced out to allow room for the ascenders and descenders of all the languages involved, but it should be complete if you have the latest version.
I use a PC and am not able to test pages on an Apple, but I have sometimes been appalled at how bad they look on Apples. I think the problem MAY be that the routinely included fonts for Apples may need to be supplemented.
I also do most development work using FireFox, and sometimes I am surprised to see unanticipated differences with Internet Explorer. In most cases, these problems have not involved the correct display of non-Roman characters, however.
The internationalization and increasing sophistication of the internet raises a need for characters other than those used in the Latin alphabet as used in English. Web pages in Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Bengali, and Japanese are now common, and these languages are sometimes mixed with others, as when a Russian bibliographic reference occurs on a page that is otherwise in English.
Until recently, there were insurmountable obstacles to this, which have recently been overcome with the adoption of an international standard called Unicode, which I will describe below.
For Chinese, most internet sites still use one of two earlier standards, Big 5 (about 13,000 traditional characters available) and Guobiao (GB) (about 7,000 simplified characters available), which I will also describe below.
First, a few things to keep in mind about Chinese characters:
Unicode will eventually provide programmers with the ability to include text in any combination of languages into the same document (or web page) without confusing the computer, and to do so in a way that any type of computer can correctly interpret. It has already made great strides in this direction, as you see from the examples in the comptuer test associated with this page. As the same examples may show instead, for many computers and computer users we are not quite there yet.
(To save space in files, there are various short-cuts that allow unicode numbers to be interpreted as 8-bit rather than 16-bit codes, producing a distinction between Unicode-8 and Unicode-16, and in the web world there is even a convention for identifying Unicode glyphs with numerical calls that stay within the older, 7-bit limits. You didn't want to know this, right?)
Over 20,000 characters have been made available for Chinese in the Unicode (or "UTF") scheme (so far). These include all of the characters in the other two sets (Big 5 and Guobiao, mentioned earlier). For example, the word "China" (Zhongguo) in the Unicode code is simply 20013-22283 in traditional characters and 20013-22269 in simplified characters.
Microsoft, while adopting Unicode as its internal system for the representation of all languages, including Chinese, has designed Chinese-specific type fonts that are keyed to the Big 5 and Extended Guobiao character sets in addition to Unicode. (See Chinese Type Fonts, below.)
Guobiao (GB) (Chinese for "National Standard") is used in Mainland China and normally produces simplified characters. About 7000 characters are available in the standard GB set, but extensions include additional characters, including all of those in the B5 set.
Additional extensions to these systems include some idiosyncratic Hong Kong characters. This has produced a bewildering range of variants on both schemes.
(A transform of basic GB codes is used in 7-bit Email transmissions and some other contexts and is called "Hanzi" (HZ) coding --Hanzi is Chinese for "Chinese characters"-- but this is not used for web sites because it inherently conflicts with the interpreters in most browsers. To the extent that one can confine one's needed characters to the 7000 of the GB/HZ system, however, it makes Email in Chinese efficient even on relatively old computer systems.)
A few type fonts are capable of being used with more than one encoding. (Don't ask me how this is possible. I am only a grubby consumer of this stuff.) Three widely distributed Microsoft fonts that do this are:
The extended B5 and Extended GB schemes contain about 21,000 characters and are closely similar to each other and to Unicode (and to ISO-2022-CN, yet another new standard being quietly developed by Chinese software engineers in China and Taiwan). At this point, the main incompatibility is not in which characters are included, but in which comptuer codes they are assigned to.
In general my Unicode Chinese pages call for SimSun, occasionally as a second choice after PMingLiU. I have not been successful in discovering the names of comparable Macintosh fonts, if there are any. (Several Macintosh salesmen have promised to provide this information, but none has ever followed up.)
We have reached the point where it takes no more than a free web browser, equipped with its "international" kit, to read web sites in Chinese, or, for that matter, to read web sites in other languages --Hindi, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian, whatever-- in the correct scripts.
To the best of my knowledge it is not (yet) possible to mix different language-specific coding systems (such as GB and Big 5) on the same web page --or anyway I haven't figured out how to do it-- so any given page can use only one coding system. For mixed-script pages, therefore, Unicode is effectively the only game in town.
In theory, the pages on this site will automatically set your browser to the correct coding scheme and type font though a charset command written into header of the page. In a few situations that doesn't seem to work, and you may need to make the changes yourself by adjusting the "character set" entry under the "view" menu item. In my experience, Internet Explorer is more likely to render pages correctly without a lot of fuss than Netscape Navigator is. (If you copy pages to a different server, they may or may not display without adjustment. Some servers have settings that override the international "UTF-8" specification.)
If the page does not specify the appropriate type font, or if you don't have it installed, the default set for that language in your browser should automatically be used. (It will also be used if you have set the browser to overrule the web author's choice of fonts.) If your browser lacks an appropriate font associated with that language, the display still may not work, and missing characters will be represented by dummy characters (usually little boxes or question marks).
Lots of sites try to tell you about all this and to sell you stuff, much of which is poorly documented and barely works or works not at all. There are a few excellent sites and some wonderful products, however. Here are some that are among the best sites I have found: