The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you're supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? I've been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren't really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff.

Spolsky, Joel. Joel on Software (2003). Articles>Language>Standards>Unicode

The New European Standard for Translation Services  

The new European standard DIN EN 15038 on translation services will become effective on August 1, 2006.

TC World (2006). Articles>Language>Standards>Technical Translation

Unicode: Making the Web Safe for Furriners

I think that Internet and World Wide Web are capitalized because they are proper names. Many names are capitalized common nouns: the White House, the Ninth Circle of Hell, the Heritage Foundation, the Civil War. I've heard arguments for lowercasing Internet and World Wide Web from people who compare them to things like the telephone system, but lowercase is certainly not the predominant style for these terms. At least 90 percent of the time, they're capitalized, and I don't think you should ignore actual use completely.

Ivey, Keith C. Editorial Eye, The (2003). Articles>Language>Standards>Unicode

UTF-8: The Secret of Character Encoding

Character encoding and character sets are not that difficult to understand, but so many people blithely stumble through the worlds of programming without knowing what to actually do about it, or say "Ah, it's a job for those internationalization experts." No, it is not! This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding.

HTML Purifier (2005). Articles>Web Design>Standards>Language