Global Design – Characters, Language & More
Richard is the W3C’s Internationalisation Activity Lead.
Character Encoding
- There are many options, but Unicode is the best – it supports many languages in a single character set – making it easy to architect multilingual solutions, and have a mix of languages on a single page (if required).
- Makes storing and retrieving multilingual data in a database much easier
- Also provides extra characters such as © ™ etc
- Has wide support in browsers, scripts, editors, databases etc.
You can declare the encoding in the HTML:
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />
Or if you’re using XML:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
Databases must be told to save data as utf-8 also – to maximize compatibility. For more details, see:
Richard’s presentation: slides (PDF) | audio (mp3)
