Good afternoon.

Today we are here to mark a significant moment of the W3C's internationalization work.

We want to take this opportunity to honor a pillar of the W3C, Addison Phillips, who is stepping down as chair of the internationalization working group after more than two decades of service.

At the same time, we are pleased to welcome Joel Sahleen as the new chair.

It is a great pity that neither Addison nor Joel is able to join us in person at TPAC this year, but we are excited to carry the work forward.

So this presentation is a tribute to Addison's legacy and a call to action to support the ongoing mission of making the web truly global.

So for more than two decades, Addison has been creating a web that works for everyone, regardless of their language, their script, or their culture.

This work doesn't happen by accident.

It requires a constant and passionate advocate.

It's about ensuring a user in Tokyo, in Nairobi, in Buenos Aires, has a first-class experience that the web feels as natural and intuitive to them as it does to someone in Silicon Valley.

So Addison has been that champion as chair of the Internationalization working group.

He has been the guiding force, ensuring that the principles of I18N were woven into the very fabric of our standards.

He has served as chair of the Internationalization working group since 2005.

At that time, the web was a vastly different place.

Internet Explorer 6 was still a dominant force.

The iPhone hadn't been released, AJAX was the hot new thing.

Throughout the shift in our industry over the past two decades, Addison has been a constant, steady hand at the helm of internationalization.

He's quite possibly the longest serving chair of any working group in W3C history.

So Addison's contributions go far beyond his role as chair.

As many of you are familiar with IETF BCP 47, for those who aren't, it is the foundational standard for defining language tags on the internet.

Every time your browser sends an accept language header, every time an HTML document declares a language, that is BCP 47 at work.

Addison was a key contributor and co-author of this important spec.

Furthermore, his work on documents like Internationalization Best Practices For Spec Developers has had a lot of impact.

This document guides all of us on how to think about internationalization from day one, not as an afterthought.

His fingerprints are under the very process of how we create standards.

And a little bit of our working group.

We ensure that W3C technologies work globally.

Our work is divided into three parts.

Language enablement is about collecting requirements, document gaps of languages, scripts and writing systems around the world.

And developer support is about reviewing specifications, about documenting best practices.

We also have a lot of special projects about some specific topics.

And we have a lot of educational resources.

We have articles, videos, techniques for web developers and stuff.

And I want to share a few recent updates to give you a sense of our current focus.

We maintain a type samples repository.

We have, to help developers and designers understand the intricacies of global typography, we have expanded our type samples repository.

Our repository provides visual examples from a multitude of scripts, helping working group discussions make informed choices.

Our task forces have been diligently working to solve complex layout challenges.

For example, our Chinese layout requirements.

We are tackling issues like the proper rendering of multilevel counters, which is critical for high quality reading experience for over a billion users.

To ensure that implementers implement these features correctly, we are continuously adding tests to our test suite.

This year, we have been adding tests for a few scripts, like Chinese, Tibetan and others.

And finally, education outreach remained important.

We have published a few articles.

We have expanded our translated articles to reach a wider audience.

We have created, we have been creating a few more videos to our YouTube channel.

And internationalization is a continuous and collaborative effort.

It is never done.

It's something that with new APIs, new CSS features, new paradigms like AI API, new internationalization challenges emerge right alongside them.

So internationalization is not someone else's problem.

It is a shared responsibility for everyone in this room who is building the future of the web.

So join the Internationalization working group.

There are many ways to contribute.

We have, you can help us review standards.

You don't need to be a linguist or a typography expert, but we welcome them.

We need web developers.

We need browser implementers.

We need spec editors who can help us analyze specifications, new technologies from a global perspective.

You can contribute to our resources.

If you don't need to… if you don't have time to join our weekly meetings, you can still make a huge impact, help us write an article, translate a tutorial into your native language, or submit a test case for features you care about.

So every contribution matters.

So I want to bring back to where we started.

We extend our deepest gratitude to Addison Phillips.

He built an incredible foundation for World Wide Web.

And let's offer our full support for our new chair, Joel Sahleen, as he leads us into this next chapter.

And let's build a real World Wide Web.

Thank you.