Support International Character Sets and Locales

International character sets are the alphabets, characters, glyphs and other symbols used in any non-English language. Technically, this includes any non-ASCII characters. To handle these characters properly, MashZone NextGen must know the character set and how it is digitally represented - the character encoding.

Note:

MashZone NextGen uses the UTF-8 character encoding to handle character sets for all languages. Both UTF-8 and UTF-16 can represent any Unicode character.

Unicode defines a unique encoding for every character in world languages that are currently in active use as well as some well-known dead languages, such as ancient Greek.

Locale identifies the language used and potentially specific regional spelling or usage aspects of the language, such as differences between American English (EN_us) versus Australian English (EN_au). Locale also identifies the formats used to present dates, times and numbers for that region.

Both the character encoding and locale help to ensure that MashZone NextGen properly handles and presents data to users. The areas of configuration involved in this support include:

MashZone NextGen Repository: the character encoding for this repository determines what character sets users can use when they create artifacts. The timezone for the MashZone NextGen Repository also affects timestamps shown in MashZone NextGen Hub.

Artifact data: MashZone NextGen needs to know the character encoding of mashable responses to properly handle this data as well as mashup results and the data shown in apps. This defaults to UTF-8 when users register mashables, but you can provide a mechanism so that users can override this default.

The locale also affects how data is displayed. This also has a default that can be overridden.

For configuration options and instructions, see Mashable, Mashup and App Encodings and Locales.

Display options: in most cases, date, time and numeric data are shown to users based on browser settings or a default locale. Some views allow users to choose date and time formats.

Logging: you can also support international characters and different locales for the messages sent to MashZone NextGen logs. See Message Log and Default Locales for details.