PUBLIC MARKS from Spone with tag internationalisation

FormatJS is a modular collection of JavaScript libraries for internationalization that are focused on formatting numbers, dates, and strings for displaying to people. It includes a set of core libraries that build on the JavaScript Intl built-ins and industry-wide i18n standards, plus a set of integrations for common template and component libraries.

Powerful cross-platform localization from Square.

The amount of work required to internationalise a website is woefully underestimated, and sometimes, the codebase is compromised to the extent that many features or capabilities are impossible to deliver with the existing code. In many cases, complete ground-up rewrites are needed to separate cleanly the business logic from the localisation requirements of countries. Mostly this requires developers and engineers of platforms to be aware of the internationalisation implications of their implementation choices. What may seem like an engineering best practice could very well be a massive barrier for localising sites to various countries.

PHP 5.3 has been recently released and one of the new features in core is the internationalization extension. It allows you to support a multitude of languages and local formats much easier than before, without having to learn all the tiny the details of local formats and rules.

A little-understood corner of Unicode is its handling for bidirectional text (The spec is a little dry). While English languages are read left-to-right, plenty of scripts (notably Arabic and Hebrew) are read from right to left. When only a single direction of text is used in a document, it's fairly straight forward, but when texts with different directions are mixed in one document, some difficulty arises in determining direction. This document attempts to explain how bidirectional text in Unicode works and what this means for the web.