Note: This Activity Statement covers the period from October 2011 to April 2012.
The goal of the Internationalization (I18n) Activity is to ensure that W3C's formats and protocols are open to all of the world's languages, writing systems, character codes and local conventions.
I18n advises W3C Working Groups, reviews W3C publications, coordinates with the Unicode Technical Committee, the IETF, ISO committees, and the localization industry. I18n increases awareness of internationalization issues via conferences, workshops, articles and Working Group Notes. I18n provides upfront input to Working Groups and reviews Last Call Working Drafts on a wide range of topics, including Unicode character normalization, international typographic requirements, script issues in text-to-speech implementations, internationalization and localization requirements for schemas, usage scenarios and requirements for the internationalization of Web services, implementation of international resource identifiers, and many more.
For the curious, "I18n" is shorthand for the first, last, and 18 middle characters in the word "Internationalization."
The Japanese Layout Task Force published a new Working Draft of Requirements for Japanese Text Layout (日本語組版処理の要件) for review, in English and Japanese. In April the final version of the document was published as a Working Group Note. A Japanese version of the document was also published in book form by TDU Press in Japan.
A significant amount of effort went into converting the tests in the Internationalization test suite to work with the W3C Test Framework. During this work, many of the tests were rewritten and many new tests were added. In particular, a large number of tests were added related to the new additions to the HTML5 specification for dealing with bidirectional text. These tests are also pending addition to the HTML5 test suite.
As part of the MultilingualWeb project, a thematic network funded by the European Commission, workshops on standards and best practices for the multilingual Web were held in Limerick, Ireland, and Luxembourg. The report for the Limerick workshop is available, and that for the Luxembourg workshop is in preparation. Both workshops attracted good speakers and generated significant enthusiasm in the community. The project end date was 31 March 2012.
A new European Commission project has now been started, to continue work on standards for the multilingual Web. The work will be done in the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group, which was set up under the Internationalization Activity in January. Felix Sasaki rejoined the W3C as a Fellow (50% time) from DFKI to coordinate the project. The new project and Working Group will inherit the branding and communication channels of the thematic network that preceded it.
The aim of the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group is to define meta-data for web content (mainly HTML5) and "deep Web" content, for example a CMS or XML files from which HTML pages are generated, that facilitates its interaction with multilingual technologies and localization processes. Like the thematic network, this work brings together stakeholders from a wide range of areas related to the multilingual Web, including language technologies, content developers and localizers. The Working Group held a kick-off meeting in Berlin in January, and held further discussions as part of the Luxembourg workshop in March.
Over the past six months, the work of the Internationalization Activity was represented in presentations at conferences which included the Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Santa Clara, California, the ASLIB Translating and the Computer Conference in London, England, and the MultilingualWeb workshops in Limerick, Ireland and Luxembourg.
Working Group participants also played a significant role in other organizations during this period, such as the IRI discussions at the IETF, the development of JavaScript internationalization, and the publication of version 6.1 of the Unicode Standard.
Since the beginning of October, 61 new translations of internationalization articles were added to the W3C site, in 9 languages.
The Working Group plans to recharter during the upcoming period, and resume the capability of producing Recommendation-track documents.
The Core Working Group will continue to provide reviews, advice and educational materials as needed. Iit will continue to work with the editors of the HTML5 and CSS specifications to integrate internationalization features. In particular, the Working Group will attempt to bring together implementers to formulate a proposal for extending support of ruby in HTML5. It will also continue to move documents currently in draft form to completion, and to develop additional guidelines for specification developers.
The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group will hold a workshop in Dublin, Ireland, in June 2012 where it will discuss the intersection between Linked Open Data and Multilingual Technologies, and the requirements gathered to date for the work of the Working Group.
There are plans to add XHTML5 and Polyglot checks to the Internationalization Checker and localize the user interface.
Work is also well under way on a set of articles and a tutorial for content developers about support for right-to-left scripts in HTML . These will improve on the current information and add details about how to use the new elements and attributes that have been added to HTML5. It is expected that this will make a significant difference to the way people work with right-to-left scripts.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internationalization Working Group (participants) | Addison Phillips | Richard Ishida | Chartered until 31 December 2013 |
| MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group (participants) | Felix Sasaki, David Filip, David Lewis | Felix Sasaki | Chartered until 31 December 2013 |
| Internationalization (I18n) Interest Group | Martin Dürst | Richard Ishida | Chartered until 31 December 2011 |
| Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Interest Group | Yves Savourel | Richard Ishida | Chartered until 31 December 2013 |
$Id: Activity.html,v 1.677 2013-05-02 18:49:33 sysbot Exp $