Internationalization

Abstract

Web authors publish in all languages of the world, and several technologies support this multilingual Web. A key factor of correct character representation on the Web is applying the appropriate character encoding. Although this depends on server settings as well, web developers can effectively contribute to proper internationalization of the physical and syntactic structures of web documents. One of the very first steps in standard web site development is to apply national settings on both the file and document content level. Unicode can be considered as the ultimate encoding and is described from the standardistas’ point of view. The use of Unicode byte-order marks, which provide information about the ordering of individually addressable subcomponents within the representation of this multibyte character encoding, can be confusing. Special characters and symbols can often be provided in various ways, including entity sets, escape codes, and hexadecimal notation.