INTERNATIONAL HTML

Putting non English, and especially non Roman language, HTML on the Web is far less simple than it should be. Great things are promised in the upcoming implementations of the HTML and Unicode standards. Meantime, kludging is often the order of the day.

Here are some links that may help you if you are faced with this task. We suggest the first things you read are this overview (part two here) from Microsoft and this practical paper by an Australian librarian faced with the task of providing multilingual HTML.

General Internationalization

• Wide discussion with many font and language links
• Language tags and language direction
• Overview of internationalization from W3C
• General information on how to use style sheets
• Validate your HTML
• How to create non English web sites
• Internationalizing your site: elements other than translation

Unicode

• Official Unicode site
• How to use Unicode
• Useful article on Unicode
• Overview of Unicode in library sciences

Specific language information

• Arabic
• Bidirectional HTML (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew)
• Chinese
• Cyrillic (Russian)
• Cyrillic character sets
• Greek
• Hindi
• Hebrew (also applies to Arabic and Farsi)
• Indian Languages
• Japanese
• Slavic languages

Browser/server configuration

• Test your browser for Unicode/UTF-8 compatibility
• Download software to update your Microsoft browser
• Configuring Netscape