Unicode Support

One of the many problems faced by IIS managers and Web developers is the issue of languages and providing multiple language Web sites for users. The technicalities of providing multiple sites are really beyond the scope of this book, but one element of IIS 6 is important to how you provide these services to your users.

Unicode support is built into IIS 6 in terms of supporting static files, and it's also built into the logging mechanisms so that you can record these transactions. IIS 6 already supports UTF-8 encoded URLs for retrieving files from a Web server.

IIS 6 also allows ISAPI filters to extract server variables in Unicode format and to get to request values and the Unicode representation of the request URL using Unicode.

This should mean that beyond the domain, you can enable and encode all the other elements of your Web site in the native script and language/character set.