Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Multilingual Issues

Most developers targeting their products for markets other than just the English-speaking world (or the German-speaking world, if you prefer) are well aware of the several issues surrounding multilingual support. We need to address two of these in relation to the utilities we're developing.

The first issue is the ability of the utilities to manipulate documents in several different character sets. XML (through its support for Unicode), Java, and Win32 all support several different character sets including multibyte sets. I have chosen Unicode's UTF-8 as the character encoding specified in the XML prolog of the instance documents these utilities create. Due to the design of UTF-8 most requirements should be accommodated. However, ...