Category: w3cWebUserAgents

Mark Davis (President and Cofounder, Unicode Consortium, and Software Engineer, Unicode and ICU, Google) and Vladimir Weinstein (Engineering Manager, Google) will deliver the keynote talk at the upcoming 6th MultilingualWeb Workshop in Rome, Italy (March 12–13).

The keynote will discuss how Google supports its ambitious goals of removing barriers to information, in an ever increasing number of languages, through recent innovations in internationalization technology.

The MultilingualWeb workshop series examines best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. It aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps, with a view to helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information and to register, see the Call for Participation.

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.

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.

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.

The program page of the 5th MultilingualWeb Workshop in Dublin on Multilingual Linked Open Data and the MultilingualWeb-LT Requirements has now been updated with links to speakers’ slides, IRC logs, and video recordings (hosted by Videolectures). It also includes links to social media information (such as tweets) about the workshop. If you have any blog posts, photos, etc. online that you would like to add to the page, please let Arle Lommel (arle.lommel@dfki.de) know so that we can link to them from this page.

The workshop was a great success. While intentionally smaller than previous Multilingual Web workshops, it brought together many of the world’s leading experts in the emerging field of linked open data and multilingual linked open data. Thanks to the efforts of the excellent speakers and the local organizers at Trinity College Dublin, the program was of great benefit to attendees.

A summary report of the workshop will follow soon.

After discussing requirements at a dedicated workshop in June, the MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has published a first public working draft of Internationalization Tag Set (ITS ) 2.0.

ITS 2.0 responds to needs that emerged since the creation of ITS 1.0 in 2007. First, ITS 2.0 focuses on HTML5. We can expect that huge amounts of Web content will be produced using HTML5 in the future, and ITS 2.0 will provide the means to properly internationalize and localize HTML5, using both human translation or language technologies like machine translation.

In addition, ITS 2.0 builds bridges to the Semantic Web area, by providing mechanisms to re-use ITS metadata (so-called “data categories”) with RDF.

Finally, ITS 2.0 defines new data categories that are demanded by the localization and language technology communities.

The development of this first draft of ITS 2.0 would not have been possible without the MultilingualWeb project: via MultilingualWeb, stakeholders of quite diverse communities have provided input to the initial metadata definitions. The W3C Internationalization Activity is now the place for these communities to move that metadata and its implementations forward.

We very much welcome feedback also from outside the Working Group – see issues discussed within the Working Group. Please send your comments to public-multilingualweb-lt-comments@w3.org. Use “ITS 2.0 WD Comment” at the beginning the subject line of your email, and add something descriptive after it. The archives for this list are publicly available.

Editors: Dave Lewis (TCD), Arle Lommel (DFKI), Felix Sasaki (DFKI/W3C Fellow), Jirka Kosek (UEP)

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

Entitled “The Multilingual Web – The Way Ahead”, the workshop surveyed and shared information about currently available best practices and standards that can help content creators and localizers address the needs of the multilingual Web. Attendees also heard about gaps that need to be addressed, and enjoyed opportunities to network and share information between the various different communities involved in enabling the multilingual Web.

This workshop also included a half-day Open Space discussion session run by Jaap van der Meer of TAUS, where attendees split into breakout groups to discuss topics of their own choosing.

You can also find links to videos, slides, etc as well as links to social media related to the event on the program page of the workshop.

This is the final workshop in the series belonging to the first MultilingualWeb project. The MultilingualWeb-LT project, which follows on from the original project, is holding a workshop in Dublin on 11-13 June entitled The Multilingual Web – Linked Open Data and MultilingualWeb-LT Requirements and plans to hold additional workshops next year that will be similar in format to those run so far.