Gap analysis checklist
Dutch (Latin script) for HTML/CSS (Draft)

The ‘ij’ is for some purposes a single letter, the 25th letter of the alphabet. The ‘y’, called ‘Griekse ij’ (Greek y), is not in the alphabet that children learn, although there are many (imported) words and names that use it. In handwriting and in some children's books, the ‘ij’ is a single glyph. (Never written as ÿ, but looking like a ü with the tail of a j or a sans-serif g. Children quickly learn that the ij is written as i+j in books and on the computer, but most people continue to write a single glyph when they write by hand. Dictionaries and alphabetical indexes usually sort ij with i, but some put ij after x. But when capitalizing a word that begins wih ij, both letters are always capitalized: ijs → IJs (meaning ‘ice’).

The special hyphenation rules are explained above.

Some other characteristics of Dutch (none of which pose problems on the Web):

• There are official rules for formatting postal codes in addresses (‘1000 AA AMSTERDAM’).
• There is a traditional way to layout (business) letters.
• The rules for quotation marks and their nesting are similar to British English. (But punctuation and quotation marks may swap place compared to American English.)
• Text is typically slightly longer than equivalent English text and words are slightly longer on average, too.
• Pronunciation is usually easy to guess from the spelling. (The other way round is not so easy, because many combinations sound the same: au = ou, dt = t, ei = ij, heetten = heten, etc.).
• Certain words (mostly names and words derived from names) are capitalized.
• Numbers use a dot between thousands and a comma before the decimals. The ‘0’ before the comma cannot be omitted (‘0,5’ but not ‘,5’).
• Negative numbers start with a minus or dash.
• The currency symbol precedes the amount (€10).
• Ordinal numbers consist of digits followed by either an ‘e’ or one of ‘de’/‘ste’, in the same size and style as the digits: 1e, 2e, 100e or: 1ste, 2de, 100ste.
• There is no space before punctuation (‘dan,’, ‘zei:’, ‘goed!’).
• There is a simple space after the full stop at the end of a sentence.
• The page numbered 1 in a book is a right hand page.
• When text on the spine of a book is rotated, it is always in such a way that the book can lie with the front cover on top (i.e., like in English but different from French).
• Some diacritics are used: diaeresis to indicate otherwise ambiguous syllable breaks (‘geërft’, two syllables vs ‘geeft’, one syllable), acute and grave accents for emphasis or French loan words (‘hé!’ ‘één’, ‘café‘), cedilla for loan words (Curaçao, reçu).