New sections, “What is internationalization” and “What the W3C Internationalization Activity does” have been added to the W3C I18n Activity’s “About internationalization” page.

The page is now also available in Chinese.

本地化与国际化有什么关系？ (Localization vs. Internationalization)

This article was translated thanks to Huan Cui.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 2 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Perso-arabic Kashmiri Gap Analysis
• Uighur Gap Analysis

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.

A First Public Working Draft of Developing Localizable Manifests has been published.

This document provides definitions and best practices related to the specification of manifest files and similar document formats on the Web.

Some specifications on the Web deal with defining sets of files or resources to be consumed together. A common design pattern is to provide a manifest or configuration file that defines which resources are available and how various resources should be used or to provide various kinds of metadata about a collection of resources.

The document is still at a very early stage, and shows the intent, rather than reliable detail. Public comments are welcome, please raise them as github issues.

This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for fully justifying text on a line and in a paragraph for a variety of scripts, and offers some advice to authors and implementers.

The section about SE Asian justification was rewritten as South & Southeast Asian Writing Systems, adding more detail, and shows examples for Tamil of inter-glyph stretching (as opposed to inter-character).

The W3C Internationalization Activity has published a first public working draft of an Internationalization Glossary. This document provides or points to definitions for various terms related to W3C internationalization.

As well as adding new terms, we plan to point to related definitions in other locations as the document evolves.

Please send any comments to the GitHub issues list.

An update for the article Declaring language in HTML has just been published.

This page describes how to mark up an HTML page so that it gives information about the language of the page. It begins with an overall summary, then provides additional details in subsequent sections.

The material was reorganised to expand the quick answer section and de-emphasise the information about XML/XHTML declarations.

The following two related articles have been updated, and one new article is published.

Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML looks at ways of handling text direction for structural markup in HTML, ie. at the document level and for elements like paragraphs, tables and forms. The article has been largely rewritten to take into account recent developments in HTML and CSS. A section was added to describe the use of logical properties. The text was made more concise.

Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

Inline bidi markup examples now contains the worked examples and the descriptions of markup that were previously in the inline bidi article. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Until now, only Gecko browsers (eg. Firefox) provided support for CSS counter styles, but an update of Blink last week brought very welcome support to a much wider range of users (via browsers such as Chrome and Edge, etc.).

To coincide with this release, the Internationalization WG updated the WG Note Ready-made Counter Styles. This contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles to their CSS style sheets.

The changes include the addition of new styles for scripts including adlam, hanifi-rohingya, lepcha, meetei, santali, ethiopic and chinese. Instructions were also added for those wanting to use different suffixes or prefixes, according to the context in which the counter style is used.

An update for the article Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML has just been published.

This article tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

The worked examples and the descriptions of markup have been moved to a new page: Inline bidi markup examples. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Send any comments via GitHub.