I18n comments MWI Best Practices 1.0

Please say about the participants in the mobile value chain s.t. like "these participants are working with multiple languages ...".

On scope of MWBP 1.0: Please give internationalization as another example of general good practice which have a specific mobile interpretation.

On aspects of usability: Please mention that proper localization is part of localizability, e.g. in the case of site usability, device usability or browser usability.

Please point to the specification XHTML Basic.

This section seems to fit better at the beginning of the document.

We propose to add to this section on "input" the requirement to provide an adequate input method for the user. Especially for complex scripts like Chinese or Japanese, this is a crucial requirement.

In some character encodings like UTF-8, scripts with a similar number of characters (e.g. latin versus indic scripts) vary in space requirements. To avoid high bandwidth / cost related to scripts, you might propose for such cases the use of the compression scheme for unicode.

Travel related information might not be useful in a mobile context, since there might be no resource for translating. Please mention the need to make it explicit in the content that such resources are missing.

Please correct the line break before "communications.".

Your mention the importance of mobile devices for developing countries. Esp. for these countries, internationalization and localization issues are crucial (e.g. support of a font for the script). such requirements should be made explicit in this document.

You don't have any normative references. Is this intended, and if yes, why?

In sec. 4.2, you describe the structure of Best Practice Statements". Nevertheless, many Best Practice Statements leave parts of this structure out. Will this be changed in a future version of this document?

CDFWG is in the references, but not in the text.

Please mention that if in the content there is a link to something which is not in the same language, it would be good to make it explicit.

UAProf is mentioned several times in the text, but not in the references. We guess you mean UAProf profile repository.

Please refer to the tutorial on Character sets & encoding in XHTML, HTML and CSS, and the QA on Setting encoding in web authoring applications, instead of the "HTTP charset" document.

"Please consider proposing that it would help bandwidth to store standard messages in the device itself, rather than download them each time."

The section mentions the use of the XML declaration for declaring in-document the encoding of XML documents, but makes no mention of the standard in-document declaration of encoding for HTML documents or XHTML served as text/html, which uses the Content-Type meta element. This seems a strange omission. Please add text describing this.

The document doesn't say that the encoding should be expressed using the HTTP header, so the test should not assume that either. It should probably say something along the lines of "Check that the encoding is declared. This could be done in the HTTP header or the XML declaration for documents served as XML, or in the HTTP header or the Content-Type meta element for documents served as HTML, or in the HTTP header or the @charset statement for CSS stylesheets."

"Specification of the natural language in use assists with predictive text input."

It is unclear to us whether this refers to standard mechanisms in X/HTML to declare language, or to a declaration specific to input modes. That should be made clearer. (If you were referring to input mode settings, we feel it would also be useful to encourage declaration of the language used in content using standard mechanisms, since that assists with not only predictive text input, but also styling, font selection, etc.)

Whatever the above refers to, this section contains no other information about how to do it, and how to test for it. This should be added.

(The i18n tutorial Declaring Language in XHTML and HTML may be helpful here for you to understand what i mean by 'standard mechanisms...'.)

We believe the document should encourage all participants in the mobile value chain to support Unicode. This is extremely helpful in ensuring international use of this technology and ease of localization of content.