Part II: Globalization

Part II: Globalization

Now that you have seen the importance of creating internationalized products, and learned about the steps inherent to the design process, it is time to examine one of the building blocks of world-ready software—globalization. As mentioned in Chapter 1, "Understanding Internationalization," creating software for the global market consists of both world-readiness and localization, with world-readiness broken down further into globalization and localizability.

While Part I, "Introduction," provided a general conceptual framework with regard to creating and designing world-ready software, including an initial look at globalization and localizability, Part II contains chapters with specific technical details to help you globalize your product. There are eight tasks necessary to achieving this goal. The first six tasks—shown in the following list—are discussed in Part II, while the final two are discussed in Part III,"Localizability."

1. Write fully implemented Unicode applications. (See Chapter 3, "Unicode." )
2. Don't make locale-specific assumptions when displaying data. (See Chapter 4, "Locale and Cultural Awareness." )
3. Handle different languages and methods for entering text. (See Chapter 5, "Text Input, Output, and Display.")
4. Don't depend on a given font. (See Chapter 5.)
5. Be aware that you might need to handle complex scripts. (See Chapter 5.)
6. Allow the user to select the language of the user interface (UI). (See Chapter 6, "Multilingual User Interface [MUI].")
7. Create an easy-to-localize UI (localizability). (See Part III-Chapter 7, "Software Localizability." )
8. Make sure your UI is mirroring-aware for bidirectional languages. (See Part III, Chapter 8, "Mirroring." )

Note that the chapters in Part II deal with some rather advanced concepts of coding Microsoft Win32 applications and of creating Web content. Therefore, it is assumed that you are already familiar with Win32 and Web development coding, and that you want to expand your scope of knowledge to encompass world-readiness.