ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

11.1. Problem

These days, it seems that the word globalization is used everywhere. The beauty of the Internet and the World Wide Web is that you can reach anyone who has a computer and a phone line or some other sort of Internet connection, be it for fun, passion, business, and so on. Nevertheless, if you want to be able to communicate with people, you must speak (or write) a language the people can understand. Due to the great proliferation of English as a primary or secondary language, many sites use English as their base language, even if they are not run by people for which this language is the main tongue. However, offering a site in the user's first language is often a great advantage over competitors that don't, because all users find it easier and more comfortable reading their primary language even when they can understand others. This is true not only for text but also for the format used to display and parse numbers, dates, and currency names. In fact, an Italian reader, like me, would interpret 07/02/2006 as the February 2, whereas an American would interpret it to be July 2. And while this may cause misunderstandings when reading the date, it may cause errors when users insert data in one format while the system expects a different one. For this reason, any modern site that wants to target a worldwide audience must be multi-language, displaying numbers and dates according to the user's local settings, and translating the full site's text (or at least the most important ...