Web Quality -Internationalization

The Internet has no borders.

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

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

International Character Sets

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 on the Internet do not use this Unicode character set.

For this reason, there must be a method for Internet clients (browsers) and Internet servers to consistently use a character set in their communication.

Marking the character set in use for each document is crucial to improving the quality of a website.

Always use the following element inside the <head> element:

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

International Dates

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

The above date could be interpreted as March 2, 2004, or March 4, 2002, or April 3, 2002.

The international standard format defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for dates is "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 dates.

Other Extensions