Monthly Archives: March 2004

Tutorial by Yves Savourel & Tex Texin at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004.

Tutorial by Richard Ishida at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004.

Presentation by Richard Ishida at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004.

Presentation by Andrea Vine at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004.

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Very briefly describes some, often surprising, aspects of how servers send XHTML to the user agent (eg. a browser), and how common user agents handle the markup they receive. This article provides background information that helps explain why some aspects of CSS styling don’t work the way you expect, and also sets the scene for the approach you should use for declaring encodings.

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

This tutorial was decommissioned on 4 June, 2007.

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 using language information appropriately.

After reading this tutorial you should:

• know how to apply language-specific CSS styling, where browsers support it
• have a general understanding of the concept of server-based language negotiation

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