Internationalization Activity Statement
Note: This Activity Statement covers the period from October 2013 to May 2014.
The goal of the Internationalization (I18n)
Activity is to ensure that W3C's formats and protocols are open to all
of the world's languages, writing systems, character codes and local
conventions.
I18n advises W3C Working Groups, reviews W3C
publications, coordinates with the Unicode Technical Committee, the
IETF, ISO committees, and the localization industry. I18n increases
awareness of internationalization issues via conferences, workshops,
articles and Working Group Notes. I18n provides
upfront input to Working Groups and reviews Last Call Working Drafts on
a wide range of topics, including Unicode character normalization,
international typographic requirements, script issues in text-to-speech
implementations, internationalization and localization requirements for
schemas, usage scenarios and requirements for the internationalization
of Web services, implementation of international resource identifiers,
and many more.
For the curious, "I18n" is shorthand for the first, last, and 18
middle characters in the word "Internationalization."
Highlights Since the Previous Advisory Committee Meeting
- Coordination with other W3C Groups & other Organizations
- The i18n Working Group published Use Cases & Exploratory Approaches for Ruby Markup as a WG Note. That document was
used during the development of the HTML Ruby Markup Extensions, which
has been integrated into the HTML5 specification. One major browser has already implemented the changes to the parser, and we are hoping that another will do so soon.
- The i18n WG reviewed a number of specifications, including CSS3
Text, CSS3 Syntax, CSS3 Counter Styles, CSS Shapes, High Time Resolution, CSS Background & Borders, and others.
- As usual, the WG continues to review and guide the work of numerous
other working groups at the W3C, in addition to its significant
contributions to HTML and CSS.
- Other Technical Work within the Activity
- The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group published ITS 2.0 as a Recommendation, and the Working Group was closed, having delivered all its deliverables on time and within two years. Ideas for future development of ITS will continue in the ITS Interest Group. An interesting video has been made available for people new to ITS.
- The i18n WG published a FPWD of the Encoding specification, which is referenced by HTML5 and CSS specifications, and is planning to publish a new version as a Last Call document by the end of May. This specification is developed by the WHATWG, and the version published at the W3C is a static snapshot to allow for reference from W3C specifications.
- The i18n WG is about to publish a new WD of Predefined Counter Styles which provides cut and paste code for authors for 122 international
counter styles (covering 28 writing systems), useful for such things as
numbered lists and numbering headings. We hope to publish it as a WG Note to coincide with the the publication of the CSS Counter Styles specification. The Working Group also contributed tests, the results of which have been helpful to finalise the CSS spec.
- Work is under way on a revision of the Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization.
- The WG continues to work on developing internationalization-related tests and put significant effort into adapting and updating the tests. It is actively exporting those tests to the to the HTML5 and CSS test suites.
- Work has begun on requirements for Chinese layout. This work will complement initiatives also under way within the Internationalization Activity such as the Indic layout requirements, and Korean layout requirements, and the work being done in the Digital Publishing IG on Latin layout and pagination.
- Outreach and Education
- The 7th Multilingual Web Workshop was held on 7-8
May 2014 in Madrid, Spain. Speaker slides are available, and video will soon follow. The keynote speaker was Alolita Sharma, Technical Director for Internationalization at Wikipedia. The event was supported by the LIDER project, and meetings related to multilingual linked data were also co-located with the workshop. We expect to have another workshop in 2015, but we will need sponsors to continue the series beyond that, since the European Commission support will have finished.
- Taking the lead from work done by the W3C Internationalization
Activity, the Unicode Consortium introduced new control characters to
the Unicode repertoire to allow isolation from the effects of the
Unicode bidirectional algorithm for inline text, and proposed that this
be the default behavior for all embedded, opposite-direction text when
dealing with scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew. After carefully studying
the issue, the i18n Working Group recommended to the HTML5 Working
Group that the
dir attribute should produce isolation as the default in
HTML5, and the specification has been changed to reflect this. As a result, we put a significant amount of work into updating several articles, including Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML, to help content developers understand how to work with the new approach.
- Several articles were also updated that discuss how to choose and declare encodings for HTML and CSS. The updates incorporate the latest developments in that area. The articles are linked from the updated tutorial, Handling Character Encodings in HTML and CSS.
- A new article was published about Using HTML’s translate attribute,
and other new articles are in preparation, and work continues on
updating existing articles to reflect recent changes in HTML and CSS.
- The WG also has a list of techniques index for authoring HTML and CSS content,
which points to resources on a task-by-task basis. Links to this
material were also added to other locations that content authors use,
such as the W3C Cheatsheet, the site topic index and the Web Platform
Docs resources. In addition, two WG Notes, Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts and Authoring HTML: Language declarations, have seen significant changes, including the removal of some information into new articles, and new versions should be published very soon.
- An overview of the work of the Internationalization Activity was given in talks at the Internationalization & Unicode Conference, Santa Clara, California, and at the MultilingualWeb conference in Madrid. Another such presentation is planned for the upcoming Unicode Conference, next October.
Summary of Activity Structure
Richard Ishida,
Internationalization Activity Lead
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