By Jennifer Kyrnin
Last week's article and the
corresponding beginning article gave some tips on writing Web pages for an
world wide audience. But there were some things that were left out. While this
article will not be addressing the needs of double-byte languages, it will
address some things that were left out of the last two articles.
Special Characters and Computer Platforms
Most platforms will support displaying the special characters, but some of them
are a bit more esoteric, and so not all machines will display them correctly. The
characters that cause the most problems are Ÿ, ÿ, Ð, ð, ß,
and þ. If you are translating into a language that uses these characters,
make sure to test your pages on both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and on
both Macintosh and Windows.
Dates
The first problem with dates is that many countries put the elements in different
orders. For example, in the United States 08/10/00 means August 10, 2000, but
in the United Kingdom, that same date means October 8, 2000. Then, if you use
two number years, you can run up against the bugs that caused such huge hysteria
last January 1. And if you use words, while it's clear, you have to translate them
and it's a lot more difficult to work with word dates programmatically.
But there is a solution. ISO 8601. This is the
International Standards Organization format for dates. The format is:
CCYY-MM-DD
- CC
- The century
- YY
- The year
- MM
- The month, between 01 (January) and 12 (December)
- DD
- The day, between 01 and 31 (depending upon the month)
In this format, today's date would be 2000-08-14.
Phone Numbers
Phone numbers are different all around the world. If you're going to write a
phone number on the Web, it's important to specify where (including country)
they will be calling. It also helps to indicate country codes. For example, to
call information in San Jose, California, U.S.A. you would dial the country code
+1 the area code 408, and the number 555-1212. You can find a list of
country codes at ACR's International Calling Code Directory.
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