Summary

n this chapter, we've examined the HTML internationalization provisions introduced in RFC 2070 and then adopted in HTML 4.0.  This part of the HTML standard will allow you to create and serve Web content in any language and using any writing system, maximizing the chances of your audience getting your message and not a mess of indecipherable characters.  In particular, we've discussed the following topics:

• What is a coded character set, what character set standards exist and how they are used;

• What is MIME and how it helps to communicate information about the character set of a document;

• Why it is important to differentiate the HTML document character set and the external character encoding of an HTML document;

• What are the pitfalls of common browsers that you should beware when working with international HTML documents;

• What tools are there in HTML 4.0 to specify the language of any document fragment and its language-specific presentation parameters (writing direction, cursive joining, rendering of quotation marks, text alignment, hyphenation);

• How the font accessibility problem may affect the future of HTML internationalization.