Easy Tutorial
Quality Styles Quality Standards Quality Tutorial Quality Readability Quality International Quality Elements Quality Accessibility
❮ Quality Readability Quality Elements ❯

Web Quality - Internationalization

The web knows no borders.

The web knows no borders.

"With the Internet comes 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 natively use this character set. However, most documents transmitted over 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 communication.

Marking the character set used by each document is crucial for improving the quality of websites.

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

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

International Dates

Do not use date formats like "04-03-02".

The above date could represent March 2, 2004, or March 4, 2002, or April 3, 2002.

The international standard format for dates defined by ISO 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 understand your dates.

❮ Quality Readability Quality Elements ❯