Unicode Explained

to use an image to denote Arabic (but naturally one needs to specify a textual replace-

ment for such an image too, using the alt attribute—e.g., alt="Arabic").

The

choice depends on the number and nature of the languages involved, as well as on

the context. In some situations, when there are many languages, two-letter or three-

letters codes might be a suitable approach, even though people will have to learn to

recognize the codes of the languages that are relevant to them. But it isn’t that difficult

to learn that en or eng stands for English. Figure 10-6 shows one set of links, using two-

letter codes, pointing to versions of a page on the European Union (EU) site http://

www.eu.int. As you can see, even this compact style requires considerable space. It is

not intuitively clear, since the languages do not appear to be ordered by any apparent

principle. (The secret order is by the native name of the language: castellano, čeština,

dansk,….) However, if the same order is used consistently, people learn to live with it.

The approach of using codes has the benefit of requiring basic Latin letters only.

Unavoidably, when we use the names of the linked page in the different languages as

link texts, we have to create a page with a mixture of languages, if only in the links.

This affects the choice of the character encoding, as described in Table 10-3 (earlier in

the chapter). Especially when several ...