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.