Areas of Concern in Internationalizing Software

Areas of Concern in Internationalizing Software

Few developers will have to pay attention to more than a few items described in this section. Most will need to catalog their strings. Some will need to use library routines for character sorting or locale-dependent date, time, or number formatting. A few whose applications use the eighth bit of 8-bit characters inappropriately will need to stop doing so. The few applications that do arithmetic to manipulate characters will need to be cleaned up. Some GUI designers will have to spend just a little more time thinking. But for the large majority of developers, there isn't much to do.

The information presented in the following sections addresses internationalization issues pertinent to a developer; some sections, however, may not be relevant to your applications.