The ultimate html resource About the Double-Underlined Links INTRODUCTION home | about | non-technical introduction newsletter archive | PRIMERS html| MySpace html| ad banners| perl & cgi| asp| javascript| database - sql| HTML & GRAPHICS TUTORIALS getting started| backgrounds| buttons| browser specific| colors| forms| frames| html 4.01 tags| html 4.01 ref| image maps| tables| web graphics| BEYOND HTML asp| cascading style sheets| css keyword ref| cgi scripting| dhtml/layers| dot net| java applets| javascript| javascript keyword ref| javascript script tips| php| security| SEO| vb script keyword ref| webmaster tips| webmaster projects| webmaster toolbox| video| xml| general reference pieces| the master list| NEED HELP? discussion boards| mentors| technology jobs| WEB DEVELOPMENT earthwebdeveloper.com| javascripts.com| Become a Partner internet.commerce HTML Goodies : HTML and Graphics Tutorials : HTML 4.01 Tags : HTML4 Reference: Internationalization Web Development Daily Newsletter Other Related Newsletters Internationalization By Sue Charlesworth Despite its name, the World Wide Web has had some difficulty reaching out past the Western languages and alphabets. In general, character representation in HTML was largely confined to the use of the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set. This character set contains letters for English, French, Spanish, German, and the Scandinavian languages, but no Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, or Cyrillic characters, among others, and few scientific and mathematical symbols. Also, the Latin-1 character set contains no provisions for marking reading direction. Part of the problem with Latin-1 is that it simply doesn't have room to handle all the alphabets and languages of the world. It is an 8-bit, single-byte coded graphic character set and, as such, can represent only up to 256 characters. Enter Unicode. Unicode is a character-encoding standard that uses a 16-bit set, thereby increasing the number of encoded characters to more than 65,000 characters. HTML 4.0 uses the Universal Character Set (UCS) as its character set. UCS is a character- by-character equivalent to Unicode 2.0. New Tags in HTML 4.0 Deprecated Tags in HTML 4.0 Obsolete Tags in HTML from Special Edition Using HTML 4: Appendix A What's New in HTML 4.0 © Copyright Macmillan Computer Publishing. All rights reserved. Tools: Add htmlgoodies.com to your favorites Add htmlgoodies.com to your browser search box IE 7 | Firefox 2.0 | Firefox 1.5.x Receive news via our XML/RSS feed