Web Quality - Internationalization

The Internet knows no boundaries.

The Internet knows no boundaries

With the Internet comes an absolute requirement to interchange data in a multitude of languages, which in turn utilize a bewildering number of characters.

--- H. Alvestrand, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), January 1998.

International Character Set

All W3C standards (since 1996), including HTML, XHTML, and XML, define an internal character set named Unicode (ISO 10646).

All modern web browsers use this character set natively. However, most documents transmitted over the internet do not use this Unicode character set.

Therefore, there must be a method for consistently using a character set in communication between Internet clients (browsers) and Internet servers.

Marking the character set used in each document is crucial for improving website quality.

Always use the following meta elements within the <head> element:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=X" />

Replace X with the character set you are using, such as ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, or UTF-16.

International Date

Please do not use date formats similar to "04-03-02".

The date above can be represented as March 2, 2004, or March 4, 2002, or April 3, 2002.

International Standardization (ISO) defines the international standard format for dates as "yyyy-mm-dd", where yyyy is the year, mm is the month, and dd is the day.

If you use the ISO format, most visitors will be able to understand your date.