WWW5

Fifth International World Wide Web Conference

May 6-10, Paris, France

Workshops: Call For Participation


WWW Internationalization


The goal of the workshop is to define the path that leads to support for all the world's languages on the World-Wide Web. This implies changes to HTML, HTTP, and probably many other things as well, such as style sheets, URL's and forms. Therefore, it also raises questions of deployment: what are the issues that keep internationalization from being used, what are the facilitators? The workshop should result in a recommendation to the World-Wide Web Consortium.

Workshop report

Latest Information

The latest information concerning the workshop: position papers, attendees, detailled program, will be made available by the workshop chairman at the following URL:

Format:

Full-Day

Workshop Committee

Organizer:
Bert Bos
bert@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People/Bos
W3C/INRIA

Chairman:
Steven Pemberton
Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl
http://www.cwi.nl/htbin/cwi.py?lastname=pemberton
CWI

Abstract

The World-Wide Web is well suited to American and Western European documents. The character set for HTML pages is ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1), which is already an improvement over e-mail, where anything that is not ASCII has to be encoded and decoded carefully. However, there are many languages that need more than Latin characters. As a start, the next versions of HTML will have Unicode as their basic character set. But internationalization (`i18n') is more than character sets: the documents will have to be transported over HTTP, they may be available in different languages, the presentation style may be different based on the language, they may use fonts that not everybody has access to, etc.

We invite browser and server developers, content providers (such as publishers), and other people to participate.

The workshop will, hopefully, lead to a set of recommendations that can guide Web development for some time to come, both as regards technical development as well as deployment issues. Based on the outcome of the workshop, the W3C will define its i18n activities.

Issues that might be discussed include:

Position papers

Participants are expected to submit a `position paper'. A position paper is a text that explains what your interest in the workshop is. It can be a previously written paper, an argument for a particular solution to an i18n problem, a description of the work you do, etc. It can be anywhere from one page to as many as you need. It should also help other participants to prepare themselves. Include as many hyperlinks as you want, including those to your home page.

The papers will be put on-line. They will also be handed out to participants at the workshop itself. Current goal is to have around 20 participants (and as many position papers). The workshop's organizing committee is responsable for selecting the participants and may refuse or invite people.


INRIA EC ERCIM W3C
bert@w3.org, Bert Bos, Workshop Organizer
Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl, Steven Pemberton, Chairman
Last updated: May 7, 1996