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This Working Group follows the rules and requirements of the latest operative version of the World Wide Web Consortium Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document and the W3C Process Document, the W3C Process Document shall take precedence.
To enable universal access to the World Wide Web by proposing and coordinating the adoption by the W3C of techniques, conventions, technologies, and designs that enable and enhance the use of W3C technology and the Web worldwide, with and between the various different languages, scripts, regions, and cultures.
The World Wide Web is by name and by actual extent worldwide. Enabling people from all parts of the world to make full use of Web technologies requires support for their languages, writing systems and cultures. The W3C is firmly committed to making sure that its specifications and other outputs are adequately internationalized.
W3C work generally proceeds at a rapid pace and in many different areas. Since Internationalization is a continued concern for the W3C (as part of the W3C goal of Universal Access), the Internationalization Working Group helps ensure that the rapid pace of innovation does not compromise the cultural and linguistic needs of global users.
The W3C Internationalization Activity was created in October 1995. In February 1998, the Internationalization Working Group was created, and has been rechartered regularly.
This charter, together with the charter for the new Internationalization Guidelines, Education and Outreach (GEO) Working Group, represents the renewal of the Internationalization Activity at the W3C and is based on requirements identified by the former Task Forces along with continuing work.
The Internationalization Core Working Group concentrates its activities on areas of concern related to internationalization and universal access across the globe.
The Internationalization Core Working Group develops recommendations and notes related to internationalization and encompasing work related to international, linguistic, cultural, and writing system variations affecting W3C technologies.
The Working Group also reviews W3C technologies as they develop for internationalization issues. This encompasses a broad array of cultural, linguistic, technical and accessibility concerns. Review work include standards created by external standards bodies and organizations related to internationalization. The Working Group maintains liaison relationships with these groups to ensure coordinated, consistent development of these standards.
This Working Group will be successful if it completes its deliverables within the charter's life; promotes their wide, consistent adoption; and provides timely and effective reviews of specifications produced by other Working Groups.
The Internationalization Core Working Group has a combination of Recomendation Track, Working Group Note, liaison, and review activities to perform under this charter. Some of these deliverables are carried over from the previous charter. Others are new and based on requirements identified internally or from public feedback.
Review of W3C specifications is not a time-bound activity and is a crucial deliverable of the Internationalization Core Working Group.
The Core Working Group reviews specifications of other W3C Working Groups for issues related to internationalization, global usage, and cultural sensitivity. Reviews are done as early as possible, but, in many cases, Last Call is the best stage for an in-depth review.
The exact schedule of these reviews depends on the progress of other Working Groups and the availability of resources in the Internationalization Working Group.
Deliverable: Specification: Features for the Internationalization of Web Services
Deliver to Candidate Recommendation a specification for the exchange of preferences and configuration information that enable Web services to provide culturally sensitive or multi-lingual operation.
This work will define SOAP Features and WSDL Features that can be implemented in a composable manner similar to other WS-* standards. Providing these features will allow service descriptions to convey the capabilities of a specific service, including language selection and sensitivity to user- or runtime-selected configuration options, as well as the mechanisms that allow language and locale negotiation, routing, and localization of the Web service interaction.
The inputs for this work are:
This specification is important and must be produced in an efficient manner.
Deliverable: Specification(s) for Language and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web.
In order to enable multi-locale operation of Web services and to create a locale negotiation layer for them, there need to be standardized methods for identifying locales and locale and/or language preferences on the Web, including non-normative guidelines for implementation.
In addition, recent activity at the IETF is in the process of updating the standard for language identifiers (RFC 3066). RFC 3066 has been widely cited in W3C specifications (HTML lang, XML xml:lang, XML Schema, XML Query, RDF, and many others). The changes in the RFC on which these W3C specifications are based may require that policies and guidelines be developed for current and future implementions of these technologies.
The Character Model for the World Wide Web ("CharMod") is an item of continuing work for the Core Working Group. This specification has been split into three parts. The expected status of the Character Model at the time this charter was written was:
The Working Group will also produce the following materials:
Deliverable: Internet-Draft: Internationalized Resource Identifiers
The Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) Internet-Draft has been submitted to the IESG for IETF Proposed Standard status.
The working group will support the IETF Standards process for advancing IRI on the IETF Standards track.
The Internationalization Core Working Group maintains important liaison relationships with a number of external standards bodies, consoritia, and organizations. This allows the group to monitor developments in the areas of internationalization and localization occuring outside but of interest to the W3C. Current liaison activities include work with the IETF, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG20, and the Unicode Technical Committee.
A particular topic of interest to the Working Group is the problem of collation on the Web. W3C technologies have struggled with defining standards for collation, sorting, and ordering on the Web. These efforts have been hampered by lack of a clear, open, consistent, and standardized way of referring to collations, and the Working Group will take special interest in efforts to develop an Internet-Draft and submit it to the IESG on the IETF Standards Track in this area.
The Working Group will produce and maintain test suites for the W3C Recommendations (WS-International, Locale Identifiers, CharMod) produced by group to assess the accuracy of implementations or Candidate Recommendations. They will also produce test suites for Internet-Drafts of interest to the Core WG (such as IRI and Collation Identifiers) to assess the accuracy of Draft Standards. These promote interoperability and test the suitability of the designs. The Working Group is expected to demonstrate interoperable implementations during the Call for Implementations phase.
The test suites produced by this Working Group are also covered by the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version).
The Internationalization Core Working Group has several documents that were created under previous charters for which there is occasional need for maintenance, clarification, errata, or updates. Notably these documents include:
The expiration date of this charter is 31 October 2006.
These are subject to revision due to editorial needs and external scheduling issues; updates will be negotiated with the related groups and recorded on the Internationalization Core Working Group home page.
| Month | Milestone |
|---|---|
| September | [PR-status?: CharMod: Fundamentals] |
| October | [1st Working Draft: RFC 3066/bis Note], [Last Call #3?: CharMod: Normalization] |
| November | [1st Working Draft: WS-International] |
| December | [1st Working Draft: Locale Identifiers] |
| Month | Milestone |
|---|---|
| January | [2nd Working Draft, WS-International] |
| February | |
| March | |
| April | [Note Status: RFC 3066/bis Note] [Candidate Recommendation: CharMod: Normalization] |
| May | [Candidate Recommendation: WS-International] |
| June | [2nd Working Draft, Last Call: Locale Identifiers] |
| July | |
| August | |
| September | |
| October | |
| November | [Proposed Recommendation: WS-International] |
| December |
| Month | Milestone |
|---|---|
| January | [Candidate Recommendation: Locale Identifiers] |
| February | |
| March | |
| April | |
| May | |
| June | |
| July | |
| August | |
| September |
Some dependencies between the following W3C Working Groups and the Internationalization Core Working Group require close cooperation during the development process; requirements posed by these other Working Groups may change during the development process, which means the interdependency between this Working Group and these other Working Groups must be managed actively:
The chair of the Internationalization Core Working Group participates in the Hypertext Coordination Group for coordination within the Document Formats Domain and with related Activities. The chair of Core will also represent the I18N GEO Working Group in this CG. W3C staff are responsible for coordinating with the other groups.
The Internationalization Core Working Group will try to maintain contact with all W3C groups working on issues potentially related to internationalization. The following groups have been identified as having work items or activities of interest to or interrelated with the work of Core:
Expected contacts with external organizations include:
The approval of any question shall be by consensus of the participants voting, provided that the Yes votes also constitute more than half of the total number of participing organizations in Good Standing. Any participant eligible to vote may assign the exercise of their vote, either on a particular question or on all questions, to another participant by so notifying the Chair (in other words voting by proxy is allowed).
Recommendation-track and Note-track work done by this Working Group shall be Public, subject to exceptions made by the Chair with the Group's consent and the restrictions set out below. The following information in the activities of this group will be Public:
Reviews, liaison activities, and the proceedings of the Working Group shall be Member-confidential within the W3C, in order to facilitate work with other Member-confidential groups. Status and review of publically available work may be made public at appropriate intervales at the discretion of the Chair with the consent of the involved groups.
The Group will have both distributed and face-to-face meetings. It is expected that the face-to-face meetings will occur about three times per year and distributed meetings will consume about one hour per week. Some work on Recommendation or Note-track deliverables may require additional time commitments on the part of the participants.
The Internationalization Core Working Group (principals and alternates) will communicate using a variety of mailing lists. These include:
public-i18n-core@w3.org (archive) Publically archived list, writable only by Group members, for the discussion of Rec-track and Note-track deliverables.Each participating W3C Member organization participates with one main representative. A W3C Member organization can designate one or more alternates for additional work. An alternate can serve as a fallback when the main representative is temporarily unavailable. The chair can accept additional alternates to allow a W3C Member organization to provide more resources to the Working Group.
All Working Group participants should be prepared to spend up to 20% of their working time on the WG. If a W3C Member organization designates one or more alternates, the 20% is to be understood as the total time devoted to the WG by the main representative and alternates, excluding the time needed by them for internal coordination. For more details about participation requirements, please see the Process Document.
Members of the Working Group must produce deliverables as agreed by the WG, and attend face-to-face meetings and regular (generally weekly) teleconferences. Between meetings and teleconferences, the Working Group maintains several mailing lists for appropriate discussion.
The initial Chair of this Working Group is Addison Phillips, (webMethods, Inc.).
The initial W3C Team contact is Martin Dürst. It is expected that this Group would consume about [1.5] FTE, including administrative logistics.
This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.
For information about patent disclosures or exclusions regarding specifications produced by this Working Group, please refer to the Working Group home page.