Position Statement for W3C I18N Workshop

Arnold Winkler, Unisys

I am the Unisys focal point for internationalization, responsible for preaching I18N for our products, and supporting the implementations of Unicode and other I18N standards. I am Unisys' representative on the W3C I18N group.

I am the convenor of SC22/WG20 - the Internationalization working group in JTC1. As such, I am also the official liaison between the W3C I18N working group and SC22/WG20.

I have experience with internationalization issues from working in related standards activities for more than 10 years (IEEE POSIX, SC22/WG15, SC22/WG20, X3T7, X3L2, NCITS/L2, Unicode TC, ...).

My main interest in the workshop is the coordination of W3C's I18N efforts and the international standards development efforts for the most effective use of rare resources and for implementation in products.

ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20 Position statement to W3C

(prepared together with John Clews)

  1. WG20 strongly supports the concept of I18N with at least the functionality as outlined in TR 11017 and has been working towards TRs and standards to implement it.
  2. WG20 encourages W3C to continue pursuing I18N in its work, and where appropriate, use WG20 standards as reference.
  3. WG20 strongly encourages W3C to work with SC2/WG2 and the Unicode consortium in areas of character encoding and especially character properties which have significant impact on the use of international web addresses and related identifiers.
  4. WG20 also strongly encourages W3C to develop ways which enable the use of ISO/IEC 14651 for ordering purposes within ordered lists and database outputs (using either the default tables, or tailoring, to produce culturally expected results). In passing, individual members of WG20 may be available to assist with specific details, e.g. implementations using XML.
  5. Note that WG20 has completed a lot of its work, and the likelihood is that new major projects which differ from any standardization practice elsewhere are unlikely to be started, but that the remaining work is of crucial importance.
  6. Language codes are outside the scope of WG20, but are of crucial importance. Some WG20 members are involved in monitoring, and some in developing, future language code extension mechanisms (in ISO/TC37/SC2/WG1 and in the ISO/TC37/SC2 Language Codes Task Force) and strong liaison is proposed with groups such as W3C on these issues.