Copyright © 2005
W3C (MIT, ERCIM, Keio)
Some lessons from this section
What this means to me
•Use topic-comment arrangements for
composite messages,
if you can, rather than sentential
arrangements
•Use coding approaches that allow syntactic
flexibility when
creating composite messages
•Be careful about reuse of text strings -
ensure that the
context of reuse is always the same
This slide summarizes some of
the practical takeaways from this
presentation.
The presentation is not
designed to give you a thorough
overview of potential
internationalization and localization
issues.
It
aims to provide you with a few practical
takeaways, but more importantly it aims to
get you thinking about what
internationalization is all about - to take
designers out of their comfort zone, and
help them realize that if you want your
content to wow people outside your own
culture and language, you need to build in
certain flexibilities and adopt certain
approaches during the design and
development - not as an afterthought.
Otherwise you are likely to be creating
substantial barriers for worldwide
use.
The presentation also aims to
show that, although using Unicode is an
extremely good start to making your
stuff world-ready, using a Unicode
encoding such as UTF-8 throughout your
content, scripts and databases is only
a start.
You
need to worry about whether translators
will be able to adapt your stuff
linguistically, but you also need to also
consider whether graphics and design are
going to be culturally appropriate or can
be adapted, and whether your approaches and
methodologies fit with those of your target
users.
"