We have a series of forms we are developing for our foreign language customers that has sent me into many a forum looking for suggestions and tips for display, encoding, and so forth. Here are my notes on it and resources for developing i18n (cool acronym for internationalization forms in Coldfusion and Apache.

Here are some notes and resources:

IANA/Unicode
Here is a list of all of the languages and their character sets:
www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
Here is the unicode site that has detailed explanation of the UTF-8 character set, which is what most people use for i18n character encoding:
unicode.org

Apache 2.0.x
There is a directive in httpd.conf that you can set the default encoding of all the pages:
“AddDefaultCharset UTF-8″
Apache can do some amazing things with character translations and extensions, like serving up pages based on a browser header’s default character encoding using mod_mime:
Apache 2 mod_mime documentation

Arabic
One of the languages we are developing in is Arabic, where users read right-to-left. To an HTML table, you can set the table to display right-to-left using the following:
<table border=”0″ cellpadding=”3″ cellspacing=”0″ dir=”rtl”>
Then, if you want a section of the text to still display left-to-right, like a product name, you can do this in the text:
<bdo dir=”ltr”>Google</bdo>
You can also simplify all of this with style sheets (of course):
W3C I18N with XHTML/CSS

All ColdFusion pages
For all pages, I used the following code to encode the form data and the page using Unicode (utf-8).
<!— Set encoding —>
<cfprocessingDirective pageencoding=”utf-8″>
<cfset setEncoding(”form”,”utf-8″)>

Here is the section of the Coldfusion documentation that talks about this stuff:
Coldfusion 6.1 livedocs

Well, Eclipse 3.0 is finally here. Download here but be forewarned all download sites are extremely slow right now.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Eclipse is a great multi programming language IDE. It even has support for ColdFusion (see my blog entry below).

I just stumbled on a great tool for data recovery called Foremost (foremost.sourceforge.net), allowing you to recover information that was deleted from the file system or from a disc. The recovery is done based on the headers and footers of the file.

I plan on using this on a CD I had burned of data that was corrupted and lost a year ago — hopefully this can recover some of that information.

A recent MSDN article details how your web site could be broken when Windows XP Service Pack 2 comes out soon.

Here is a link to the article.

A couple of interesting things about pop-up blocking and Flash, it states:

Q: Does your Web site launch pop-up windows through other objects (e.g., Macromedia Flash movies)?
A: These pop-up blocker blocks these pop-up windows. There is no workaround.

It is not clear whether they mean pop-ups through Javascript calls in Flash or the normal getUrl() actionscript method called within Flash. Anyone have more information about this?

Also, if you use ColdFusion to launch a download, it looks like the content-type (if you are using ) and using content-disposition:inline, the extension on the file has to match the content-type:

Make sure your Web site’s Content-Type matches the file extension.
Exception: This change does not affect cases where a “content-disposition=attachment” header is sent. In those cases, the file name or extension suggested by the server is considered final and is not changed based on Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) sniffing.

Came across this wicked awesome site Browsercam.com that allows you to submit a URL and they will give you a gallery of how that page renders in Linux, Mac, and Windows using different browsers, and even what happens if you have Flash on your page and the browser doesn’t have the Flash plug-in. Very cool!

You can then save the zip file with all the images and use it as a testing resource and also publish the thumbnails publicly so you can share them with other members of the team. Very handy especially for testing CSS rendering. Costs $10 per hour to use or a monthly subscription, but they have a demo you can use as well for 8 hours. Demo here as well.

Mozilla and Opera have formed the WHAT (Web Hypertext Applications Technology) working group to “develop specifications based on HTML and related technologies to ease the deployment of interoperable Web Applications, with the intention of submitting the results to a standards organisation.” This will be for things like Web Forms, Web Apps, and Web Controls (more information on these).

WHAT working group website.

They will supposedly turn in their findings to the W3C when they are done. Should be interesting to see how standards like this will affect products like ColdFusion.