Most platforms will support displaying the special characters, but some of them are a bit more esoteric, and so not all machines will display them correctly. The characters that cause the most problems are Ÿ, ÿ, Ð, ð, ß, and þ. If you are translating into a language that uses these characters, make sure to test your pages on both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and on both Macintosh and Windows.

Dates

The first problem with dates is that many countries put the elements in different orders. For example, in the United States 08/10/00 means August 10, 2000, but in the United Kingdom, that same date means October 8, 2000. Then, if you use two number years, you can run up against the bugs that caused such huge hysteria last January 1. And if you use words, while it's clear, you have to translate them and it's a lot more difficult to work with word dates programmatically.

But there is a solution. ISO 8601. This is the International Standards Organization format for dates. The format is:

CCYY-MM-DD

CC The century

YY The year

MM The month, between 01 (January) and 12 (December)

DD The day, between 01 and 31 (depending upon the month)

In this format, today's date would be 2000-08-14.

Phone Numbers

Phone numbers are different all around the world. If you're going to write a phone number on the Web, it's important to specify where (including country) they will be calling. It also helps to indicate country codes. For example, to call information in San Jose, California, U.S.A. you would dial the country code +1 the area code 408, and the number 555-1212. You can find a list of country codes at ACR's International Calling Code Directory.