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 and articles. I18n produces specifications such as the Character Model for the World Wide Web, Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios, and Ruby Annotation Markup. 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 Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group was successful in keeping the core of the participants of the ITS Working Group and gathering a new community of users and developers around ITS 1.0. This was achieved by working on implementations in widely spread technologies (like an ITS DOM interface or an ITS XSLT application), ITS rules for popular formats, and by making reviews of emerging technologies for ITS adoption.
The Japanese Layout Task Force published a first draft of its requirements document in English and in Japanese and continued to hold regular face-to-face meetings between the Japanese participants. The Task Force met with some of the non-Japanese participants in Tokyo in April, and since then the document has grown significantly, taking into account feedback received and adding new information. A new document structure was implemented to enable more effective parallel development of the content in Japanese and English. Many figures were created to better support non-Japanese readers, and tabular appendices describing behavior of characters in certain contexts (e.g. line breaking behavior) are under development to support the automatic application of the layout requirements.
The Core Working Group continued to provide a variety of formal and informal advice to W3C Working Groups and external parties.The group undertook new reviews for CSS Marquee, XSD 1.1, SSML 1.1, XHTML Access, POWDER, WebCGM 2.1, SKOS, and SVG Tiny and also continued discussions with Working Groups whose specifications had been reviewed prior to the last AC meeting. Other discussions included such things as character encoding, IRIs, lang vs. xml:lang, Content-Language meta usage, and translation controls in HTML5, web fonts and vertical text in CSS, rdf:text (strings with language tags) in RDF/OWL, the use of LEIRIs (legacy extended IRIs) between XML and IRI specs, key events in the Web API group, and various other topics related to such things as Widgets, mobileOK, XMLHttpRequest, etc. The group also reviewed and commented on external work on proposed changes to BCP47, Atom bidi text, IDNAbis developments, the proposed IDNA preprocessing spec at the Unicode Consortium, requirements for XSL from the XML Consortium in Japan, etc. Team members participated in face-to-face meetings with SSML and CSS Working Groups.
Work was begun on updates to the following Working Drafts: Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N), Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization, Handling Right-to-left Scripts in XHTML and HTML Content, and Working with Time Zones
In the area of guidelines, education and outreach, the Core Working Group made significant improvements to the article An Introduction to Multilingual Web Addresses, produced a lengthy new article on Migrating to Unicode, and made many improvements to existing articles, mostly prompted by reader feedback. Also a large number of tests were created or updated in areas such as Web fonts, CSS encoding detection, language declaration detection, language dependent styling and ruby markup, etc, and results of these tests on leading browsers were published. Several of these tests fed into the work with HTML and CSS Working Groups. The templates for articles and tutorials were redesigned to improve efficiency in dealing with the 25 new translations received since the last AC meeting. Working group members presented talks on internationalization at the @media Conference in London, England (a major designer/developer conference), the Open Road Conference in Melbourne, Australia, and two Web Standards Group gatherings in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. They also presented a tutorial on ITS at WWW2008, and two tutorials at the 32nd Internationalization & Unicode Conference, San Jose, USA. There were also presentations on the work of the Japanese Layout Task Force at the Unicode Conference and SVG Open 2008.
The Core Working Group will continue to provide reviews, advice and resource materials as needed. Among the issues that are expected to arise, we see further review of the HTML5 specification, an update to the IETF's BCP 47 (language tags) that will involve updating materials and education, and further discussion on webfonts and vertical text in CSS. The latter will include development of a set of educational materials and tests to support the vertical text draft in CSS3. The Working Group will also continue work on the Working Drafts mentioned above, plus new guidelines related to case folding in specifications.
The Japanese Layout Task Force will have a face-to-face meeting at TPAC 2008 with the participating working groups. It expects to publish a new public Working Draft just before TPAC, and will then take the feedback received during TPAC into account and publish most of its current material as a Working Group Note around the end of the year. This publication will also serve as a basis for evaluating the need for continuing work on remaining material or potentially new work items.
The Internationalization Tag Set Interest Group will continue to promote the adoption of the ITS Recommendation within and outside of W3C, and gather information in preparation for its further development.
Three groups will need to recharter around the end of 2008.
| Group | Chair | Team Contact | Charter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internationalization Core Working Group (participants) | Addison Phillips | Richard Ishida | Chartered until 31 January 2009 |
| Internationalization (I18n) Interest Group | Martin Dürst | Richard Ishida | Chartered until 31 January 2009 |
| Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group (participants) | Yves Savourel | Felix Sasaki | Chartered until 31 December 2008 |
| Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Interest Group | Yves Savourel | Felix Sasaki | Chartered until 31 December 2009 |
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