Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Language Features

Coordinating character sets is only the first part of the challenge. Even languages that share a character set may have different rules for hyphenation, spacing, quotation marks, punctuation, and so on. In addition to character shapes (glyphs ), issues such as directionality (whether the text reads left to right or right to left) and cursive joining behavior have to be taken into account. This section introduces the features included in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 and higher that address the needs of a multilingual Web.