WWW Internet

Key Concepts of International Web Design

The primary activity of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is to develop protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. The widely adopted Web standards define key parts of what actually makes the World Wide Web work.

A fundamental concern and goal of the W3C since the beginning has been the access to the Web for all. It is easy to overlook the needs of people from cultures different to your own, or who use different languages or writing systems, but you have to ensure that any content or application that you design or develop is ready to support the international features that they will need [1].

The following 7 quick tips summarize some important concepts of international Web design:

  1. Encoding: use the UTF-8 (Unicode) character encoding for content, databases, etc. Always declare the encoding.
  2. Language: declare the language of documents and indicate internal language changes.
  3. Navigation: on each page include clearly visible navigation to localized pages or sites, using the target language.
  4. Escapes: use characters rather than escapes (e.g. á á or á) whenever you can.
  5. Forms: use UTF-8 on both form and server. Support local formats of names/addresses, times/dates, etc.
  6. Localizable styling: use CSS styling for the presentational aspects of your page. So that it’s easy to adapt content to suit the typographic needs of the audience, keep a clear separation between styling and semantic content, and don’t use ‘presentational’ markup.
  7. Images, animations & examples: if your content will be seen by people from diverse cultures, check for translatability and inappropriate cultural bias.

Bibliography

  1. Richard Ishida, W3C.: Internationalization Quick Tips for the Web 2015-04-01 13:22.
    Retrieved: 29.06.2016.
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Microsoft released Version 1.0 of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core

Today, June 27. Microsoft announce the release of .NET Core 1.0, ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0, available on Windows, OS X and Linux after they first announced the project 18 month ago. Microsoft says that more than 18’000 developers from 1’300 companies have contributed to the cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, micro services, libraries and console applications. The platform is maintained by Microsoft and the .NET community on GitHub.

The characteristics of .NET Core are:

  • Flexible deployment: Can be included in your app or installed side-by-side user- or machine-wide.
  • Cross-platform: Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux; can be ported to other OS’s. The supported Operating Systems (OS), CPUs and application scenarios will grow over time, provided by Microsoft, other companies, and individuals.
  • Command-line tools: All product scenarios can be exercised at the command-line.
  • Compatible: .NET Core is compatible with .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono, via the .NET Standard Library.
  • Open source: The .NET Core platform is open source, using MIT and Apache 2 licenses. Documentation is licensed under CC-BY. .NET Core is a .NET Foundation project.
  • Supported by Microsoft: .NET Core is supported by Microsoft, per .NET Core Support

To get more information about .NET Core 1.0 see https://www.microsoft.com/net/core#windows