Weaving the Multilingual Web: Standards and their Implementations
Intended Audience: |
Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, Content Developer |
Session Level: |
Intermediate |
The World Wide Web is still developing very quickly. The basic components
HTML and HTTP are slowly stabilizing while new formats such as XML
(eXtensible Markup Language; for general markup) and CSS (Cascading Style
Sheets; for styling information) are being used more and more. In this
quickly moving environment, internationalization (i18n) is important to make
sure that all users worldwide can equally benefit from Web technology. The
Web can be considered a single application, all parts of which must work
together regardless of country, language, etc.
This tutorial will give an introduction to internationalization on the World
Wide Web. A central part is the Unicode-based Reference i18n Model, which
appeared first in HTML and has now made its way in XML, CSS and more. It
will be described in detail with particular emphasis on HTML and CSS. The
tutorial also addresses language tagging, bidirectionality, multilingual
typography and advanced applications. A section is devoted to the design and
implementation of multilingual Web sites, discussing localization issues,
language negotiation and other aspects.
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