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Descriptions of changes made to resource pages (articles, FAQs, tutorials, and tests) on the W3C Internationalization site. This information is not usually posted on the home page. Of use as a reference if you want to learn about changes in a new version of a given page. May also be particularly interesting for translators who want to be informed when a document they translated has changed.
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The W3C Internationalization Activity home page was converted to a blog format in April of this year. The blog supersedes these news filter pages, although similar categories will be used to group blog posts. The old pages will remain available as a historical record. The new blog approach also makes it possible to easily host short articles with a comment facility, such as requests for public feedback.
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This article answers the question: "How do I set character encoding in my web authoring applications?"
The subsection entitled "Microsoft Notepad & WordPad 2000/XP (Windows)" was split into two, and substantive improvements were made to the text in each. [search key: qa-setting-encoding-in-applications]
This article answers the question: "What is the most appropriate way to associate CSS styles with text in a particular language in a multilingual XHTML/HTML document?"
Much of the text has been changed or rearranged. A new subsection was added to explain how :lang recognizes language information declared higher up the hierarchy, unlike the other selectors. Links were also added to newly improved tests and a new results page relating to the use of the selectors described here. [search key: qa-css-lang]
The 3 tests were rationalised, and a section was added to each page that tests the applicability of stylesheet rules when language information is inherited from an element further up the hierarchy, rather than declared on the element in question. This is a key distinguishing feature between behaviour of :lang and [lang |= '...']. [search key: test-css-lang]
Information about declaration of language has been removed to a separate tutorial, Declaring Language in XHTML and HTML (Draft). This tutorial now focuses on uses of language information in documents.
The tutorial has also been adapted to the latest format for tutorials, and, thanks to Pasquale Popolizio, the Italian translation has been revised to support the changes. (This is the first translation of a tutorial in this format.) [search key: tutorial-lang]
Substantive changes:
Improved the code in the example in the section "'Standards' vs 'Quirks' modes".
This was applied to the English, Romanian and Swedish versions of the document. The new French version already has it. [search key: serving-xhtml]
Reorganized and amplified the following sections to improve clarity:
One paragraph was moved from the section 'Directional typing of characters'. [search key: inline-bidi-markup]
Specifying the language of content is useful for a wide number of applications, from linguistically sensitive searching to applying language-specific display properties. In some cases the potential applications for language information are still waiting for implementations to catch up, whereas in others, such as detection of language by voice browsers, it is a necessity today. Marking up language information is something that can and should be done today. Without it, it is not possible to take advantage of any of these applications.
This document is one of a series of documents providing HTML authors with techniques for developing internationalized HTML using XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects of CSS3. It focuses specifically on advice about specifying the language of content. It is produced by the Internationalization GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group of the W3C Internationalization Activity. [search key: html-tech-lang]
Language tags are used to indicate the language of text in HTML and XML documents, and are also used in HTTP headers, SMIL and SVG switch statements, CSS pseudo-elements, etc. This article describes how to choose values for language tags.
The article augments an existing article with information that previously existed in a tutorial. The article title was also changed from "Language tagging in HTML and XML". [search key: language-tags]
Recent developments enable you to add non-ASCII characters to Web addresses. This article provides a high level introduction to how this works. It is aimed at content authors and general users who want to understand the basics without too many gory technical details.
This article was updated to point to the new RFCs, published on 25 Jan 2005, relating to URIs and IRIs. [search key: idn-and-iri]
Significant change to 'Version information' section. Instructions now say to put the following note near the top of the page, rather than at the bottom:
<p id="disclaimer">This document is a translation. In the case of any discrepancy or errors, the <a href="/International/XXX/YYY.en.html">latest English original</a> should be considered authoritative. <a href="#copyright">Original copyright</a> belongs to W3C, as shown below.</p>
The text has also changed.
Improved clarity in several places. Susbtantially changed section 'Changes to the text' to say that translators should send information, rather than add details to the document. Added to section 'Notification of new or updated translations' information about news and RSS feeds, and Ivan's list of translations.
Added 7 additional companies to the list of those who use UTF-8 on their home page. [search key: qa-who-uses-unicode]
This article has been temporarily withdrawn pending additional work. [search key: qa-i18n]
Most of the Internationalization tests at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/ have been improved in the light of lessons learned over recent months. Changes include the addition of explanatory information at the beginning of each test page that describes what is being tested and provides useful notes. Presentation has been standardized and improved. There have also been a small number of changes made to existing test pages, and a small number of new tests have been added. Finally, links to the results pages have been added to the test overview page.
See the list of previous news.
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