A Complete Guide to Web Design

For More Information 463

International-

ization

For More Information

Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition

Cursive Joining Behavior

In some writing systems, the shape of a character varies depending on its position
in the word. For instance, in Arabic, the same character at the beginning of a word
looks completely different when it is used as the last character of a word. Gener-
ally, this joining behavior is handled within the software, however, there are
Unicode characters that give precise control over joining behavior. They have zero
width and are placed between characters purely as instructions for specifiying
whether the neighboring characters should join.

HTML 4.0 provides mnemonic character entities for both these characters, as
shown in Table 27-2.

For More Information

The following are good sources of information on the internationalization of the
Web.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Internationalization and Localization
http://www.w3c.org/International/
This site contains excellent technical information, as well as updates on activi-
ties surrounding the efforts to make the Web multilingual.

Babel

http://babel.alis.com:8080/

Babel is an Alis Technologies/Internet Society joint project to internationalize

the Internet.

HTML Unleashed,by Rick Darnell, et al. (Copyright 1997, Sams.net Publishing,
ISBN: 1-57521-299-4)

This book contains an excellent and in-depth explanation of internationaliza-

tion issues in Chapter 39, Internationalizing HTML Character Set and

Language Tags. This chapter is available online athttp://www.webreference.

com/dlab/books/html/39-0.html.

Table 27-2: Unicode Characters for Joining Behavior

Mnemonic Numeric Name Description

‌ ‌ “zero-width non-joiner” Prevents joining of charac-

ters that would otherwise

be joined

‍ ‍ “zero-width joiner” Joins characters that would

otherwise not be joined