W3C  W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity: Making the World Wide Web truly world wide!
 

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What is 'i18n'?

'i18n' is an industry standard abbreviation for 'internationalization' (because there are 18 letters between the 'i' and the 'n').

About the Internationalization (I18N) Activity

Mission

The mission of the W3C Internationalization Activity is to ensure that W3C's formats and protocols are usable worldwide in all languages and in all writing systems.

Groups

The Internationalization Activity aims to ensure universal access to the World Wide Web. The work takes place in the following groups:

  1. The Internationalization Core Working Group reviews specifications produced by other W3C Working Groups, looking for any issues that would cause barriers to deployment and use due to language, script, region or culture. It also produces its own documents. These include requirements, guidelines and proposals for specification writers. It also produces resources and does outreach to help developers and content authors better understand and more widely implement the internationalization aspects of W3C technology. [Home page] [Charter]
    Join the group

  2. The Internationalization Interest Group is a public group supporting the activity of the Internationalization Working Group. Anyone can participate in the Interest Group by simply joining one of the mailing lists. There are no teleconferences. The www-international mailing list is used for general discussion about internationalization topics. The public-i18n-bidi list is for discussion of topics related to right-to-left script support. [Home page] [Charter] [Archive]
    To subscribe, send a mail to www-international-request@w3.org or public-i18n-bidi@w3.org with subscribe as the subject.

  3. The ITS (Internationalization Tag Set) Interest Group aims to foster a community of users of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) by promoting its adoption and gathering information for its further development. ITS provides a set of concepts that can be mapped to markup and that make it easier to internationalize and localize documents. There are also a set of Best Practices for XML Internationalization. The group works through a public list and wiki, and monthy teleconference calls. [Home page] [Charter] [Archive]
    To subscribe, send a mail to public-i18n-its-ig-request@w3.org with subscribe as the subject.

  4. The Japanese Layout Task Force is creating a document about requirements for general Japanese layout realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. Much of the discussion if in Japanese. The document will be mainly based on a standard for Japanese layout, JIS X 4051. However, it will address also areas which are not covered by JIS X 4051. [Home page]
    To participate, join one of the participating Working Groups. Contact the I18n Activity Lead for more information.

The Internationalization Activity Statement introduces some concepts relating to internationalization, and describes the current status of Internationalization Activity.

Useful links:

Public mailing lists & Archives

The following mailing lists allow members of the public to participate in or track the work of the Internationalization Activity. The various groups in the Activity also use member-only lists (mostly for adminstration) that are listed on the group home pages.

To post to public lists, you need to first subscribe. You do not need to be subscribed to follow the links to the archives.

  1. www-international is for general discussions about Web internationalization. This is the main list of the Internationalization Interest Group (i18n IG), and by subscribing to the list you become a member of the IG. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  2. public-i18n-bidi is for discussions about bidirectional text and other issues related to support of right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu, Thaana, etc. You should also send comments to this list about w3c documents related to right-to-left scripts. This list is managed as part of the Internationalization Interest Group (i18n IG), and by subscribing to the list you become a member of the IG. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  3. public-i18n-cjk is for discussions about issues related to support of Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages and scripts. You should also send comments to this list about w3c documents related to these scripts, such as the Japanese Layout Requirements document. This list is managed as part of the Internationalization Interest Group (i18n IG), and by subscribing to the list you become a member of the IG. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  4. public-i18n-indic is for discussions about issues related to support of South Asian languages and scripts, such as Hindi, Tamil, etc. You should also send comments to this list about w3c documents related to indic scripts. This list is managed as part of the Internationalization Interest Group (i18n IG), and by subscribing to the list you become a member of the IG. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  5. public-i18n-its-ig is for discussions about the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) and related topics. You should also send comments to this list about the ITS Recommendation and related publications. This list is managed as part of the ITS Interest Group, and by subscribing to the list you are a member of the IG. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  6. public-iri is the public mailing list of the IETF IRI Working Group. IRI stands for Internationalized Resource Identifiers. IRIs extend URIs beyond ASCII. The Working Group will update the IRI specification, RFC 3987 (see http://tools.ietf.org/wg/iri for charter, scope, work items.) [Archive] [Subscribe]

  7. www-i18n-comments is for comments on various documents produced by the Internationalization Activity. If your comments are likely to involve discussion, we would encourage you to subscribe to and post your comments to one of the lists above. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  8. public-multilingualweb is also hosted by the W3C. This list is provided as part of the MultlingualWeb project for discussion of standards and best practices work needed to support deployment of the Multilingual Web. [Archive] [Subscribe]

  9. public-i18n-core is used by the Internationalization Core Working Group for certain, group-oriented technical discussions. The archive is public, but you should join the working group to subscribe. [Archive]

Participation

The Internationalization Activity welcomes the participation of individuals and organizations around the world to help improve the appropriateness of the Web for multiple cultures, scripts and languages.

Joining a Working Group, Interest Group or Task Force:

Other ways to contribute:

Benefits of participation:

Participation can benefit the participant and his or her organization in the following ways.

The groups need people with a wide range of skills, from technical authoring to specialised knowledge of particular technologies.

Contacts

Author: Richard Ishida, W3C.

Content last changed 2010-08-19 14:02 GMT

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