Learning XML

Chapter 7. Internationalization

This chapter covers the ambitious efforts of XML designers to provide a level of markup that is acceptable anywhere on earth. Of course, that's easier said than done. Until recently, the thought of internationalization could make a developer wake up in a cold sweat. The computer has to be taught to recognize numeric encodings, output the correct glyphs, and allow users to input potentially thousands of different ideographs from a puny workstation keyboard. XML, striving to be the universal markup system, must address the problem of how to handle the many thousands of writing systems around the world. How can this task be accomplished?

XML tackles this problem first by adopting a character encoding system called Unicode, which can handle a huge number of different languages and symbol sets. Second, it provides for metadata about the language of the content it's marking up. Finally, in satellite technologies such as XSLT and CSS, it allows the developer to specify language-specific behavior.