Internationalization
Globalization, Internalization, Foreign language support
Not everybody works in the English language
Not even all English users speak/use the same English (UK English vs. US English)
We are use to writing left to right
In Arabic and Hebrew it is right to left, there are some that go top to bottom
Why is there a major Japanese personal computer industry?
Japanese were frustrated with American keyboards.
What the Japanese did, is to look at the PC, and looked at the question as to what was needed to type the Japanese language, software changes were made for this change.
Japanese were driven to making their own PCs because they need to enter in the Japanese language.
In order to support another language, you use the same hardware, just different keys.
Same number of keys, same bit patterns, but the keytop may say ‘A’ but shows something like ‘Q’. Same keytops, same machine.
Code Tables vs. Unicode
You have to be aware of both.
Code table is a very simple approach. When you are working in a country, you have a table of 127 characters for that language. You assign each of those characters to a code.
Suppose you want to take a computer and make it work in Russian. When you work with the following numeric value, you want it to go to the gliff in that language.
Need to work with more than 8 bits, thus Unicode.
There is a version of Unicode called UTF-16, the sixteen bit variant of Unicode that appears in browsers and Java.
UTF-8 has become popular for internationalization. Some organizations believe it is UTF-16 is best for internationalization.
In order to do internationalization. Must work 3 ways. With UTF-8, UTF-16, and code tables.