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)
- 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.
- WG20 encourages W3C to continue pursuing I18N in its work, and where
appropriate, use WG20 standards as reference.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.