Chapter 16. Internationalization

Every day, billions of people write documents in hundreds of languages. To live up to the vision of a truly world-wide Web, HTTP needs to support the transport and processing of international documents, in many languages and alphabets.

This chapter covers two primary internationalization issues for the Web: character set encodings and language tags. HTTP applications use character set encodings to request and display text in different alphabets, and they use language tags to describe and restrict content to languages the user understands. We finish with a brief chat about multilingual URIs and dates.

This chapter:

Explains how HTTP interacts with schemes and standards for multilingual alphabets

Gives a rapid overview of the terminology, technology, and standards to help HTTP programmers do things right (readers familiar with character encodings can skip this section)

Explains the standard naming system for languages, and how standardized language tags describe and select content

Outlines rules and cautions for international URIs

Briefly discusses rules for dates and other internationalization issues