Information about the language in use on a page is important for accessibility, styling, searching, and other reasons. In addition, language information that is typically transmitted between the user agent and server can be used to help improve navigation for users and the localizability of your site. This tutorial will help you take advantage of the opportunities that are available now and in the near future by declaring language information appropriately.

By following this tutorial you should be able to:

• recognize the available alternatives for declaring language, and how they differ,
• understand the difference between metadata about the expected language of the audience and the text-processing language,
• choose the best way of declaring language for your content
• locate information about how to specify language attribute values.

[search keys: tutorial-language-decl]

Getting bidirectional text to display correctly can sometimes appear baffling and frustrating, but it need not be so. If you have struggled with this or have yet to start, this tutorial should help you adopt the best approach to marking up your content, and explain enough of how the bidirectional algorithm works that you will understand much better the root causes of most of your problems. It also addresses some common misconceptions about ways to deal with markup for bidirectional content.

At the end of this tutorial you should be able to:

• create effective XHTML and HTML pages containing text written in the Arabic or Hebrew (or other right-to-left) scripts,
• understand the basics of how the Unicode bidirectional algorithm works, so that you can understand why bidirectional text behaves the way it does, and how to work around problems,and
• take decisions about the appropriateness of alternatives to markup.

[search key: tutorial-bidi-xhtml]

If a user agent (eg. a browser) is unable to detect the character encoding used in a Web document, the user may be presented with unreadable text. This information is particularly important for those maintaining and extending a multilingual site, but declaring the character encoding of the document is important for anyone producing XHTML/HTML or CSS. This tutorial will give you an understanding of the topic that will help you make the right choices when doing so. The topic is not as straightforward as it may sometimes appear, and the advice contained here is the end result of a great deal of thought and discussion.

After reading this tutorial you should:

• get advice on choosing an encoding for XHTML/HTML documents
• understand when and how to declare the character encoding (charset) for documents using XHTML/HTML and CSS
• have a grasp of aspects of serving and coding XHTML/HTML files that affect the above
• know when and how to use escapes and entities to represent characters

[search keys: tutorial-char-enc]