W3C: I18N Activities and Outlook (Draft)

LISA Forum, London, UK

July 2003

Richard Ishida (ishida@w3.org)

This talk is available at: http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0703-ri-lisa/

Objectives

Outline

W3C Overview
The World Wide Web Consortium

about 70 Team members

about 425 Member Organizations

W3C Overview
W3C Goals

I18N Activity
Goals

Hogy a Világháló valóban az egész világé lehessen!

جعل شبكة الويب العالميّة عالميّة حقًّا!

ליצור מהרשת רשת כלל עולמית באמת!

전세계의 월드 와이드 웹으로 만들기!

缔造真正全球通行的万维网

締造真正全球通行的萬維網

ワールド・ワイド・ウェッブを世界中に広げましょう

Κάνοντας τον Παγκόσμιο Ιστό πραγματικά Παγκόσμιο

वर्ल्ड वाईड वेब को सचमुच विश्वव्यापी बना रहें हैं !

Сделаем "Всемирную паутину" действительно всемирной!

"Дүниежүзілік торды" нағыз дүниежүзілік етеміз!

Making the World Wide Web world wide!

I18N Activity
History

I18N Activity
Structure

I18N Activity
Related work: Translation activities

Core Task Force
Overview

Core Task Force
Character issues

A Hungarian word that is shown in two forms: all precomposed characters, and all decomposed characters.

This Hungarian word can be coded in more than one way. Unicode allows for 'precomposed' and 'decomposed' representations of accented characters. This can cause problems for comparisons of strings during searching, sorting, verification, etc. It can also create problems for pointing to a specific location in a string. To overcome these difficulties you need to normalize the text. W3C recommends early normalization based on Unicode form NFC.

Core Task Force
What is the Character Model?

'Guidelines' for specification writers

Core Task Force
URI issues

If people are not able use non-ASCII text in domain names this prevents them using intuitive and memorable names for their domains. Work is underway to rectify this situation. In each of the two cases above the second link will take you to the site, but the first link is really what the user wanted.

Core Task Force
What are IRIs?

Core Task Force
Styling issues

Japanese text in horizontal writing mode.

Core Task Force
Styling issues

Japanese text in vertical writing mode.

Differing scripts require differing typographic features to represent text naturally on the Web. This example shows Japanese. Typographic features represented here that are not used in English include autospacing around Latin text and numbers, appropriate character-based wrapping behaviour, ruby, and vertical text that includes some horizontal Latin characters or numbers. Styling and markup on the Web has to be adapted to support these requirements.

Core Task Force
Reviews

Core Task Force
Highlights

Web Services Task Force
What are Web Services?

Web technology (in particular XML) that enables machines talk to machines

Web services stack:

(business logic)
Choreography (proprietary)
WSDL 1.2 WSDL 1.1 (proprietary)
SOAP 1.2 SOAP 1.1

HTTP GET

(proprietary)
HTTP (POST) (DIME) (proprietary)
TCP/IP (proprietary)

Applications: RCP, messaging, application integration

Web Services Task Force
WS issues

Web Services Task Force
Highlights

GEO Task Force
International usability issues

Country:
First name:
Last name:
Address:
City:
State:
Zip code:
Telephone: ()
Application date:

Don't copy this bad example !!

Nearly every aspect of this form creates difficulties for localization or use in other countries than the USA. The form assumes that people write names, addresses and dates in the same way around the world, whereas there are actually many different approaches for each of these. Content authors / developers need advice about what the pitfalls are, and how best to design around these issues.

GEO Task Force
International usability issues

Country:
First name:
Last name:
Address:
City:
State:
Zip code:
Telephone: ()
Application date:

Don't copy this bad example !!

Forms can also present issues relating to character encoding. How do you ensure that you can preserve and handle the wide range of characters and encodings that could be typed in by your user. In this example, some of the accented letters in Hungarian do not appear in the Latin 1 character set.

GEO Task Force
Questions ...

GEO Task Force
Mission

GEO Task Force
Highlights

GEO Task Force
Approach

Summary

We'd like you to help!

Ways to help