One of the advantages of distributing information over the Internet or an intranet is that you can create international Web sites that users can access from different countries. Users can request pages that have been localized into their own language, which they read in localized browser versions.
When you create a Web site that contains pages in different languages, you may need to convert strings that are passed between the browser and the Web server, or between an ASP script and a COM component. If all pages on the Web site are written in the default character set used by the Web server, ASP does the conversion automatically. If you author pages in different character sets, however, you need to use ASP commands that specify how the strings should be converted. For example, if your site contains some pages in one of the Japanese character sets and others in one of the Chinese character sets, you need to specify which character set ASP should use while processing strings for a particular page.
ASP also provides commands that support the cultural conventions for different locales, such as the format used for currency, time, and date. As with the string conversion commands, you need to use the locale commands only if your scripts do not use the default locale for the Web server. For more information, see the following topics.