Home page

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

This is an update, in a temporary location, of the tutorial Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS. (Please be careful about bookmarking the location, since it is only temporary.)

A lot of new material was added, eg. related to the UTF-8 BOM, normalization, etc., and the material was rearranged significantly. The rearrangement was to downplay slightly the XHTML 1.0 issues, given that that is now only relevant to IE6, but also to help readers more quickly find information they need for the format they are dealing with.

The explicit distinction between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1 with regard to MIME types was removed, since the XHTML2 WG is hopefully very close to issuing a PER that enables XHTML 1.1 to be served as text/html.

The update adds information about HTML5.

Where a section corresponds to an article that has been updated, those updates were also migrated to this document.

[search keys: tutorial-char-enc]

Thanks to the Sorin Velescu, the following articles have been translated into Romanian.

Data si Ora (Dates and Time)
Formate pentru data (Date formats)
Capacitati de afisare (Display capabilities)

[search keys: article-o-time qa-date-format qa-display-capabilities]

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

Consejos rápidos sobre internacionalización para la Web (Internationalization Quick Tips for the Web)
Introducción a las codificaciones y a los sets de caracteres (Introducing Character Sets and Encodings)

[search keys: gs-characters article-quicktips

Thanks to Dénes Kohn, Metaphraser Translation Company, the following articles have been translated into Hungarian.

Karakterkódolás ellenőrzése a validatorral (Checking the character encoding using the validator)
HTTP Fejlécek Ellenőrzése (Checking HTTP Headers)
Karakterkészletre vonatkozó beállítás a .htaccess fájlban (Setting charset information in .htaccess)

[search keys: qa-validator-charset-check qa-headers-charset qa-htaccess-charset]

Thanks to the Sorin Velescu, the following articles have been translated into Romanian.

Localizare vs. Internationalizare (Localization vs. Internationalization)
Site-uri Web monolinguale vs. multilinguale (Monolingual vs. multilingual Web sites)
Site-uri internationale si multilinguale (International & multilingual web sites)

[search keys: qa-i18n qa-mono-multilingual qa-international-multilingual]

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

HTML, XHTML, XML y códigos de control (HTML, XHTML, XML and Control Codes)
¿Quién utiliza Unicode? (Who uses Unicode?)
Migración a Unicode (Migrating to Unicode)

[search keys: qa-controls qa-who-uses-unicode article-unicode-migration]

Thanks to the Sorin Velescu, the following articles have been translated into Romanian.

Schimbarea codificarii paginii (X)HTML in UTF-8 (Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8)
CSS3 si textul international (CSS3 and International Text)

[search keys: qa-changing-encoding article-css3-text]

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

Verificación de encabezados HTTP (Checking HTTP Headers)
Configuración de información charset en .htaccess (Setting charset information in .htaccess)
Verificación de la codificación de caracteres mediante el verificador (Checking the character encoding using the validator)

[search keys: qa-headers-charset qa-htaccess-charset qa-validator-charset-check]

The Unicode Consortium has just announced this new release of CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository), the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data. This data is used for software internationalization and localization: adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks as formatting of dates, times, time zones, numbers, and currency values; sorting text; choosing languages or countries by name; transliterating different alphabets; and many others. See more information about the Unicode CLDR project (including charts).

FAQ-based article: Which language tag is right for me? How do I choose language and other subtags?

Following the publication of RFC 5646 earlier this year (replacing RFC 4646 as part of BCP 47), the IANA Subtag Registry now contains almost 8,000 subtags, and the list of subtag types was increased with the introduction of extended language subtags. This article tries to simplify the choice of an appropriate language tag for your needs by outlining the necessary decisions in a step-wise fashion.

By Richard Ishida, W3C. [search key: qa-choosing-language-tags]