W3C Internationalization Workshop

1 February 2002, Washington, DC, USA

Results: Consensus and Suggestions

CONSENSUS: The i18n Activity should coordinate with other interested parties.

CONSENSUS: W3C should eat its own dog food in terms of Internationalization, where practical.

CONSENSUS: W3C should leave the categorization and cataloguing of languages, dialects and scripts to other standards bodies, but probably have a formal liaison if we have requirements to support.

Straw poll on what is important to the W3C:

(re-sorted ex post facto)

Guidelines, best practices	24
Existing work (reviews, character model, liaisons)	18
Distributed services incl Web services, locales, collations	18
Education & Outreach	10
Localizability	10
Gathering user requirements/solutions	7
Multilingual domain names (IDN)	5

CONSENSUS: Guidelines should be addressed to

Content and site design
Authoring tools
Testers
Schema developers
User agents
Administrator
Specs
Style sheet developers

CONSENSUS: Finish the Character Model

CONSENSUS: Continue the reviews of W3C specs

CONSENSUS: It is fairly important to consider how to use unencoded characters and their properties (incl. collation properties)

CONSENSUS: It is important to work on the notion, content, identification, propagation of and use “locale” information (language, date/time formats, collation, time zone, etc.).

CONSENSUS: Education & Outreach is important.

CONSENSUS: Education & Outreach should include:

Getting i18n into university curriculums
Create tutorial material
Try to push i18n content in books and Web sites
Make the W3C site appealing and a site people return to frequently for i18n content
Use our own technology and guidelines to show their usefulness

CONSENSUS: It is important to do architectural work and guidelines to ensure easy localizability of Web content. That may include developing rules files, tag sets, etc.

CONSENSUS: It would be useful to build a network of contacts to serve as a source of i18n/linguistic expertise related to the Web.

CONSENSUS: For the Web, it is important to have a single solution the IDN problem.

Drafts are in WG Last Call and need review.

Summary and conclusions

Straw poll on participation in potential activities:

Guidelines, best practices	7	RI
Existing work (reviews, character model, liaisons)	8	MW
Distributed services incl Web services, locales, collations	11	ST
Education & Outreach	4	ST
Localizability	6	YS
Gathering user requirements/solutions	X
Multilingual domain names (IDN)	X

19 persons voted for at least one of the above.

The attendants express their appreciation to W3C for organizing the meeting, to Barbara Jarzyna for helping greatly with the organization and to Martin Dürst for efficiently chairing the meeting.