Slide

To help with outreach, a number of improvements have been made to the Internationalization Activity site recently, and these will continue into the future.

Site search

From the top level pages you can now search within the /International site.

'Site map'

The left side of the Internationalization home page now contains a collapsing list that helps you find your way around the site more effectively. We are in the process of changing links on lower level pages to reflect the basic anchor categories in this list.

Topic index

We provide an index to the available resources, organized by topic. The second level headings in the index are accessible in the collapsing menu on the left of the home page, but also for the time being in a separate, more quickly accessible list on the right.

Techniques index

One particularly important aspect of the work relates to the development of authoring techniques for content authors working with XHTML/HTML and CSS. This is still a work in progress, but efforts have been made to provide task-based information in a number of ways.

Using the techniques index a content author could, for example, look up information about specifying language attribute values. They can choose to link to an outline summary of recommendations for this task, or a list of external resources, such as the list of IANA-registered tags. The outline view incorporates summary information about support in major browsers for the features described. From the outline view they can go into greater detail on any particular topic. For example, if they want to know more about the use of zh-Hans and zh-Hant tags, the user clicks on the summary text and is taken to an appropriate section of a techniques document where they find information about how to use this feature, a discussion of pros and cons, and more detailed information about user agent support issues, as well as a list of relevant additional resources.

News filters & RSS feeds

We have also made available lists of announcements grouped into a number of useful 'buckets', dependent on the expected audience. Some of these allow for you to track changes to articles and the like - particularly useful for translators. Another tells you when an new resource has been put out for pre-publication review. Etc.

There are RSS feeds associated with each of these filters, so you don't need to continually visit the site to discover when things change.

Future plans

Future plans include the development of some 'Getting Started' materials, aimed at bridging the gap for absolute beginners and the more technical resources we have on the site. This material should also be useful for managers, and the like.

We are also in the process of adding a short feeback form to the resource pages. We are very interested in hearing from people who have constructive suggestions for how to improve the site and its resources.

We are also working slowly in the background on redesigning the look and feel of the site. This work involves discussions with the WAI (Web Accessiblity Initiative) folks at the W3C, who have done a lengthy user-centred analysis and design for their own pages (results to be implemented soon).


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