Category: Highlight

Comments are requested on the following proposed update of the article The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML prior to final publication. NOTE THAT the article is in a temporary location, and will be moved to its final location after the review.

The majority of the article has been rewritten, with the aim of reducing the previous warnings against using the BOM for UTF-8 documents. Also taken into account is the change to the HTML5 spec that raises the precedence of the BOM versus the HTTP header in terms of character encoding declaration.

Please send any comments over the next two weeks to www-international@w3.org (subscribe).

We hope to publish a final version at the beginning of the New Year.

Led by experts in the field, two special break-out sessions on Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and Linked Open Data (LOD) are planned for the upcoming MultilingualWeb workshop, to be held at the headquarters of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization in the heart of Rome, on 12-13 March. We will also continue the Open Space discussions that have been so popular in the past.

In addition, lunch-time exhibition sessions will showcase the recent work and progress made on implementing the ITS 2.0 specification, a major effort in the W3C to improve support for language- and translation-related processes.

Register soon to ensure you get a place, especially if you are interested in also speaking. See the Call for Participation.

The W3C’s MultilingualWeb workshops bring together approximately 150 implementers, leading developers, localizers, researchers and users of the Web to discuss best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. One and a half days of presentations will be followed by break-out sessions that will allow attendees to explore additional topics in an in-depth, discussion-oriented fashion.

Participation is free.

If you have any questions, contact the program committee chair, Dr. Arle Lommel (arle.lommel@dfki.de).

This document defines data categories and their implementation as a set of elements and attributes called the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

ITS 2.0 is designed to foster the creation and localization of multilingual Web content, focusing on HTML5, XML based formats in general, and to leverage localization workflows based on the XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF), and language technology applications like machine translation or named entity annotation. In addition to HTML5 and XML, algorithms to convert ITS attributes to NIF is provided.

Last Call means that the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group feels that ITS 2.0 is ready to move to recommendation. If you have comments on the document, please send them to the list mentioned in the document status before 10 January.

12–13 March 2013 in Rome, Italy, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

The W3C announces today the sixth in a series of workshops exploring the mechanisms and processes needed to ensure that the World Wide Web lives up to its potential around the world and across barriers of language and culture.

Anyone may attend at no charge and the W3C welcomes participation by both speakers and non-speaking attendees. Early registration is encouraged due to limited space.

Building on the success of five highly regarded previous workshops in Madrid, Pisa, Limerick, Luxembourg, and Dublin, this workshop will emphasize the application of theory and technology to meet practical needs. The workshop brings together participants interested in the best practices and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web. It provides further opportunities for networking across communities that span the various aspects involved. We are particularly interested in speakers who can demonstrate novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. Registration now online.

ITS 2.0 responds to current and future needs to extend ITS 1.0 by providing metadata (ITS “data categories”) for HTML5 as well as XML, using ITS data categories for RDF, and adding new data categories relevant for localization and language technologies.

In addition to various clarifications and smaller changes from the second version released in July, this third version of the document adds additional data categories that are now ready for review: Disambiguation, Preserve Space, Id Value, Target Pointer, Preserve Space, Localization Quality Issue, and Localization Quality Précis. In addition it adds support for the use of CSS selectors as an alternative to XPath, updates the ruby markup section to match the HTML5 ruby model, and simplifies a number of sections for greater usability

Please take a look at the new version, and send any comments to public-multilingualweb-lt-comments@w3.org (subscribe at the archive main page). Use “ITS 2.0 WD Comment” at the beginning of the subject line of your email, and add something descriptive after it.

Send any comments before the beginning of October. We are planning to publish a new working draft in October, and a feature complete “last call” working draft in November.

Several sets of tests are now available related to line breaks, word breaks and hyphenation in CSS3 Text and Unicode Standard Annex #14 (Line Breaking Properties). Some of the tests are rewrites of previous tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite. There are also many new tests.

See the main i18n test page for list of tests and results for major browsers. The tests are also published in the i18n-css3-text test suite in the W3C Test Harness.

The previous set of tests in the Internationalization Activity test suite looking at white space handling for various non-Latin scripts has been rewritten and published today. The new tests are based on behavior described in the CSS3 Text Module. These tests explore, in particular, how browsers render text in Asian and South-East Asian scripts when white space appears at the end or beginning of a line in the source text.

A list of tests and a snapshot of results for major browsers is available. The tests are also published in the i18n-css3-text test suite in the W3C Test Harness.

The results page is the latest to be adapted so that the results shown are automatically pulled from the W3C Test Harness database when the page is displayed. This functionality has now been extended to all test results pages using the new format.

The deadline for submissions to speak at the FEISGILLT event has been extended to 14 August.

In various tracks, this event brings the communities involved in ITS 2.0 and XLIFF 2.0 closer together. Experts from the language services industry, from language technology, and from the Web community at large will discuss the role of these upcoming standards and help to shape their interplay. The ITS 2.0 track is supported by the W3C MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group and by the MultilingualWeb community at large.

If you want to speak at the event, submit a proposal as soon as possible.

This event will be held in Seattle, USA, as part of the Localization World Conference. In order to participate, you must register. Participants in W3C working groups will receive a 20% discount for attending the FEISGILLT event. For more information, see the FEISGILLT Call for Participation.

A new version of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 draft has just been published as a Working Draft.

ITS 2.0 responds to current and future needs to extend ITS 1.0, that is: provide metadata (ITS “data categories”) also for HTML5, use the data categories for RDF, and add new data categories relevant for localization and language technologies.

In addition to various clarifications and smaller changes, this second version of the document provides several new data categories discussed during the MultilingualWeb workshop in Dublin in June (e.g. Domain and Locale Filter).

Please take a look at the new version, and send any comments to public-multilingualweb-lt-comments@w3.org (subscribe at the archive main page). Use “ITS 2.0 WD Comment” at the beginning the subject line of your email, and add something descriptive after it.

Send any comments before the end of August. We are planning to publish a new working draft in late August, and a feature complete “last call” working draft in November.

A report summarizing the MultilingualWeb workshop in Dublin is now available from the MultilingualWeb site. Alongside the summaries are links to slides, video recordings, and the IRC log, for each speaker and for the discussion sessions.

Entitled “The Multilingual Web – Linked Open Data and MultilingualWeb-LT Requirements”, the workshop focused on two specific topics: the intersection between Linked Open Data and Multilingual Technologies, and requirements of the W3C MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group.

In both areas, the workshop was a great success. First, it helped to connect leading experts in the areas of linked open data, language technologies, terminology and localization. And second, detailed discussion about MultilingualWeb-LT requirements provided a major input to the creation of the first public working draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0.

This workshop was unlike previous workshops because its focus was specific to two topics, and the audience was intentionally restricted to experts in those areas. The MultilingualWeb-LT project plans to hold additional workshops next year that will have the broad scope and similar format to previous workshops.