In 2009 I published an article in Dr. Dobb’s journal entitled “Unicode and Java Web Applications – “. In the article I addressed ‘character encoding’ – related i18n problems by providing experiences-based guidelines and Java-based examples on how to enable UTF-8 support in multi-tiered Java-based Web applications.
Did you know?
i18n stands for internationalization and is a number-based word or a numeronym. A numeronym is commonly defined by replacing the letters between the first and last one with a number representing the ‘number of letters omitted’.
Honestly, I’ve already forgot about the article thinking that local characters – related problems (as in the case of Slovenian language ‘čšž’) are not an issue in 2018 anymore. Well, today I’ve received a certificate of reviewing, which convinced me of the opposite.
I have to admit that I am not an active software developer anymore, however from the conceptual view, I am still convinced that in order to assure a complete Unicode support, each of the IT components, involved in characters processing has to support a common character encoding as depicted on the following, almost ten years old picture. And while IT systems are becoming increasingly complex, there is a chance that a legacy component will make troubles in this manner.
At the bottom line I am happy twice – the first reason is to receive a certificate from Elsevier, I really appreciate this. And the second reason is that a technical article I’ve published a decade ago may still be useful today.
Gregor Polančič 