Position Statement for W3C I18N Workshop
Cathy Wisslink, Microsoft
- Experience in areas covered by the workshop scope:
- 7+ years working on Windows (NT) globalization, mostly in
National Language Support (including locale model, collation,
encodings, input, Unicode).
- Microsoft UTC rep since 2000
- NCITS/L2 chair as of 2002
- Published papers on the following topics in 2001: Unicode support
on Windows 2000 and Windows XP, the Microsoft Layer for Unicode on
Win9x Systems, Indic collation issues
- Needs of my company in internationalization, or what I'd like to see
addressed, most of which may fall in the category of W3C outreach work:
- IDN and standardization: this is a highly important topic to the
industry at large, with many companies implementing solutions
before any standard is in place. How will these short-term
solutions impact long term implementation? Will the industry commit
to some type of standard, or will IDN fragment into a number of
solutions? How will we address interoperability questions which
will definitely come up?
- Culture identifiers: the old style locale model is rapidly
becoming obsolete, and RFC 3066 (1766) is not quite able to handle
some of the new variants in identifying markets (e.g., ISO
standards don't cover all languages, no standardized way to add
script variant to RFC codes, etc.). What direction will these
identifiers take?
- Emerging markets: how is the internationalization work in W3C
addressing concerns of emerging IT markets (most notably SE Asia,
India, former Soviet republics), if at all? It is apparent that
some of these countries/regions are feeling somewhat shut out from
various internationalization standards, and as the IT market opens
up in these regions, there is a need to ensure that standards are
representative of these markets.
- My expectations on final outputs of workshops:
- I'd like to have an idea of where other participants are with regards
to the above topics (what are their concerns? How are they taking these
concerns into account in their implementations?), and if any of these
concerns will be addressed at the W3C level in some fashion.
- My contributions:
- My work currently touches upon many areas of globalization on
Windows. As such, I can speak to what we are doing specifically in the
Windows 2000/XP environment. In addition, we are working with many
newer/smaller markets, and I can contribute information about our
experiences there.