Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization 1.0
Outline View

•

For HTML documents and XHTML documents served as text/html, always use the meta element to explicitly declare the document's character encoding.

•

Use meta charset declarations as early as possible in the head element.

•

For HTML use the lang attribute, and for XHTML use the lang and xml:lang attributes in the html tag.

•

Whenever possible, avoid HTML attributes with values of right and left. Use CSS in a linked stylesheet instead.

•

Whenever possible, avoid using CSS constructs that specify values of right and left. Use before and after if available.

•

Choose UTF-8 or another Unicode encoding for all content.

•

If you don't use a Unicode encoding, select an encoding that best supports the languages / characters to be included in the page text. [Ed. note: What does this mean? Does it mean, which maximizes the opportunity to directly represent characters and minimizes the need to represent characters by markup means such as character escapes? Does it include the idea that you should choose the most commonly used encoding for a region?]

•

Check that user agents (all agents that must render the page) adequately support the page encoding that you have selected. If not, you might need to use a more widely supported encoding to achieve an adequate degree of user agent support.[Ed. note: Couldn't this be rolled into the previous technique?]

•

Use character sets and encodings that will be accessible and common to your users.

•

Where practical, declare the page's character encoding by setting the charset parameter in the HTTP Content-Type header.

•

For XHTML served as text/html, where practical use an XML declaration with an encoding attribute.

•

For XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml, always use an XML declaration with an encoding attribute.

•

For HTML documents and XHTML documents served as text/html, always use the meta element to explicitly declare the document's character encoding.

•

Use meta charset declarations as early as possible in the head element.

•

Use the preferred names from IANA's charset registry.

•

Avoid escapes when the characters to be expressed are representable in the character encoding of the document.

•

When using escapes, use the hexadecimal form.

•

If, for a specific application, it becomes necessary to refer to characters outside [ISO10646], characters should be assigned to a private zone to avoid conflicts with present or future versions of the standard. Use of private use characters is highly discouraged, however, for reasons of portability.

•

[Ed. note: Add something about the use of inline images to represent characters ]

•

Do not use <font> tags - use CSS styles instead.

•

Always use the serif and sans-serif fallbacks

•

Don't assume you know which fonts will be available on the client.

•

Don't rely on text just fitting in a space

•

Some guidelines for content authors who know that users won't have all the necessary fonts.

•

For HTML use the lang attribute, and for XHTML use the lang and xml:lang attributes in the html tag.

•

Use the lang and xml:lang attributes around text in a language other than that of the whole document.

•

Use the hreflang attribute on the a element.

•

Follow the guidelines in RFC3066.

•

Use the two-letter ISO 639 codes for the language code wherever possible, rather than the 3-letter codes.

•

Whenever possible, avoid HTML attributes with values of right and left. Use CSS in a linked stylesheet instead.

•

Whenever possible, avoid using CSS constructs that specify values of right and left. Use before and after if available.

•

Do not use CSS styling to control directionality in XHTML/HTML. Use markup.

•

Only use bidi markup where it is needed.

•

Add dir="rtl" to the html tag any time the overall document direction is right-to-left.

•

Do not add dir="rtl" to the body tag.

•

Use logical order, not visual ordering for Hebrew.

•

If using an ISO character encoding for Hebrew, choose iso-8859-8-i and use logical ordering.

•

Add the dir attribute to a block level element (only) to change its directionality.

•

Use a Unicode right-to-left mark (RLM) or left-to-right mark (LRM) to make neutral characters such as punctuation and spaces appear in the right place when they fall between different directional runs.

•

Use a Unicode right-to-left mark (RLM) or left-to-right mark (LRM) to correctly order separate runs of same direction text separated by neutral characters such as punctuation and spaces.

•

Use the dir attribute on an inline element to resolve problems with nested directional runs.

•

For attribute text or element text that allows no internal markup, use Unicode control characters for bidirectional control.

•

Do not use Unicode control characters for bidirectional control if markup is available.

•

Do not leave white space at the end of inline elements that mark a directional boundary.

•

Treat mirrored characters as if any word left in the name meant 'opening', and right meant 'closing'.

•

Use the bdo element to force the directionality of a sequence of inline characters.

•

Use the full form of the year.

•

Use words (abbreviated if necessary) for the month.

•

For forms, use structured fields or popup menus for date and time input.