UI fonts and languages

Question

I am developing a multilingual web application that has a nice looking UI. I thought using CSS 3's font-face property to make it even nicer UI, but I'm not really sure if that's a good idea. According to some people I have talked to, different languages need different fonts. This means that there is no single font that can display characters of all languages, because the same character may look different across languages.

For example, according to Wikipedia, the Unicode code point U+4EE4 looks different in Korean and Japanese languages.

So my question is, would it make most sense to contain the fonts within the language packs -- or within the themes of my UI?

Answer 1

If you're going multi-language, use the lang or xml:lang attributes to properly call out the language of a text snippet or the page to the browser and let the browser decide the proper font. This should work much more reliable than trying to do this from CSS.