whole HTML templates approach wrong

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Gentlemen, I have figured out how to use the poorly documented
transcheck command, and the winner is....
$ for i in $(cd messages;ls); do echo -n $i:\ ; bin/transcheck -q $i;done
ar: 15 warnings in 2 files
ca: 51 warnings in 4 files
cs: 2 warnings in 1 files
da: 17 warnings in 2 files
de: 38 warnings in 10 files
es: 40 warnings in 6 files
ja: 0 warnings in 0 files
...
sv: 50 warnings in 2 files
tr: 21 warnings in 2 files
uk: 17 warnings in 2 files
vi: 9 warnings in 3 files
zh_CN: 31 warnings in 4 files
zh_TW: 93 warnings in 10 files

That's right, zh_TW, another gold medal.

Actually it appears your whole approach is wrong.
With entire .html and .txt files to be translated, there will always
be missing buttons, etc. If instead using just strings in .po files,
if a message isn't translated, at least the English will be shown to
the user.

Anyway how terrible to have unlucky languages with missing buttons.

Let's see how MediaWiki does this. There is just one template, and the
stings are translated only.

Doesn't that make more sense? You program's functionality shouldn't
vary by language, but just the strings that describe the
functionality.

If one wants to customize, then one should customize the template,
affecting all languages.

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So I thought maybe for my zh_TW site, I shall change the site language
to English, to avoid running all the 93 files with all kinds of
missing code in them, here on Dreamhost's installation where even me,
site administrator, has only the web interface. (I downloaded the
source and am looking at it on my home machine, not Dreamhost's.)

I thought just maybe I could at least put some Chinese in some of the
four pages that we are allowed to edit via the web interface.

But then I see the HTTP header already has the ascii character set
defined, an as you know that overrides anything I can put in the body.

Yes, I could have the zh_TW versions shown to users by default, and
even edit them first to my hearts content, but that means I must
change the site language to zh_TW, consigning myself to running the 93
defective parts.

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I find putting & # 12345 ; style entities into the boxes on admin.cgi/.../general may be a workaround for getting past the charset stuff. Haven't tested ZH_tw blobs in EN email, or seen what will become of zh_TW archives when switching the _monolithic_ site language to EN.

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See e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableless_web_design .