This is the golden age for multilingual (multi-script) fonts
In the early days of website globalization, there was no such thing as a “global font.” That’s because there was no such thing as a font that supported the world’s …
Unicode
Think beyond .com: From country codes to internationalized domain names
One of the major takeaways from the Web Globalization Report Card is the importance of providing “front doors” to your localized websites. These doors begin with the addresses themselves, which …
Hyperglot shows you which fonts support which language(s)
This is an interesting new tool from the font designers at Rosetta: Hyperglot. As seen here, you can select a font (640 so far) and see which scripts and languages …
1,000 languages: The world’s most multilingual website
The Jehovah’s Witnesses announced today that its website reached 1,000 languages, an impressive achievement. The release notes: On November 4, 2019, jw.org, the official website of Jehovah’s Witnesses, reached an unprecedented …
Think Outside the Country (now available in Japanese)
I received my copies of the Japanese edition of Think Outside the Country and am very impressed. The book, like the English edition, is in full color and uses high quality paper. …
The top 25 websites from the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card
I’m excited to announce the publication of The 2018 Web Globalization Report Card. This is the most ambitious report I’ve written so far and it sheds light on a number of new …
NOTO, as in No Tofu
First of all, I love tofu. But when you see it on a computer screen, it’s not so nice. Like those two rows of “tofu-shaped” objects shown below that indicate a …
Do your web developers know about Globalize?
Today, the JQuery Foundation has announced availability of Globalize 1.0: Globalize provides developers with always up-to-date global number formatting and parsing, date and time formatting and parsing, currency formatting, and message …
Designing a multi-script typeface
An interesting article on the development of a new multi-script font. To create the font, four designers worked on a script each: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic. The end result …
A map of the multilingual Internet
With Mongolia gaining approval for its new internationalized domain name (IDN), there are now 30 countries and territories with non-Latin top-level domains. I’ve updated my map and, as you can …
Q&A with Jukka Korpela, author of Going Global with JavaScript and Globalize.js
What’s the most important thing you want JavaScript developers to learn from this book? By making use of free tools such as Globalize.js, developers can easily adapt their applications for …
France to offer support for actual French domain names
The French domain name registry AFNIC has published a PDF explaining why it will soon support internationalized domain names (IDNs). According to AFNIC: As of July 3, 2012, it will …
Going Global with JavaScript: Coming this Fall
JavaScript enables everything from simple online sign-up forms to complex web-based applications. But there is not much information out there on how to effectively internationalize and localize JavaScript code. Which …
Visualizing Unicode
Unicode is one the great achievements of our era. It’s also incredibly intimidating. So I love to come across videos and web sites that help demystify Unicode. A week ago …
The next Internet revolution will not be in English
This visual depicts about half of the currently approved internationalized domain names (IDNs), positioned over their respective regions. Notice the wide range of scripts over India and the wide range …