The W3C have just released a short article about internationalisation (i18n), called Introducing Character Sets and Encodings. One of the responsibilities associated with being a technical architect is to ensure that the non-functional requirements are met. With more and more project teams building web applications for international audiences, it's becoming increasingly important to test that your applications can deliver content and accept input in varying character sets. This is a great example of a non-functional requirement that often gets neglected.

If you're currently designing a web application for public consumption and are new to topics including UTF-8, character encoding, HTML/XHTML page encoding and validation, take a look at the W3C's new article. Oh, and don't leave it too late to start testing that you're meeting your non-functionals. From experience, i18n is often harder than it seems.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 26 January 2006 10:33:59 GMT #