Internationalization - Web Standards: Mastering HTML5, CSS3, and XML - page 48

Checking I18N
Those settings and markup segments that support internationalization can be checked by the W3C Internationalization
Checker [24]. It can determine whether the HTML/XHTML documents contain non-NFC class names and identifiers, the
language settings of pages, and so on. The validator is described in detail in the “Validating I18N” section in Chapter 14.

Summary
In this chapter, you learned the importance of internationalization settings that enable properly displayed special
characters on web sites. You know by now that there is a wide choice of character encoding systems, many of which
have been used for decades but became obsolete in recent years. There is an ultimate variable-width character
encoding, called UTF-8, which is a flavor of Unicode, omits the BOM, and is backward compatible with the once most
widely used encoding scheme, ASCII.
The next chapter will describe the markup, where most standardization efforts take place. The markup
not only provides the document structure and content but also serves as the basis for accessibility support and
semantic annotations. As you will see, there is a wide choice of markup languages, not just HTML5, the latest and
most popular one. You will learn the HTML and XHTML elements and attributes that can be safely applied in a
variety of documents while maintaining standard compliance. The chapter will also demonstrate the benefits of
strict markup.

References

1. The Unicode Consortium (2014) The Unicode Standard: A Technical Introduction.

Unicode, Inc. http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html . Accessed
14 October 2014

2. Unicode (2014) Unicode 7.0 Character Code Charts. Unicode Consortium.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/ . Accessed 14 October 2014

3. Yergeau F (2003) UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646 [RFC3629]. The Internet

Society. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3629.txt . Accessed 14 October 2014

4. Duerst M, Suignard M (2005) Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). The Internet

Society. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987 . Accessed 14 October 2014

5. Ishida R (2010) An Introduction to Multilingual Web Addresses. World Wide Web

Consortium. http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/ .
Accessed 14 October 2014

6. Hickson I (ed) (2010) HTML5 (Edition for Web Authors) revision 1.4439. A vocabulary

and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML. Editor's Draft. World Wide Web Consortium.
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/semantics.htm l . Accessed 29 September 2010

7. Hickson I (ed) (2014) HTML5 (including next generation additions still in development).

Draft Standard. Apple Computer, Inc., Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software ASA.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/semantics.html .
Accessed 14 October 2014