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.

The article Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 13 May.

This article 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 make more concise.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

Sometimes people wonder whether it’s possible to obtain a definitive list of language tags which indicate a RTL base direction, so that there would be no need for separate direction metadata. This article looks into whether that is really feasible. (Spoiler: The W3C Internationalization Working Group believes it is not.)

Read the article.

To comment on this article, raise a GitHub issue.

Information about text direction and language needs to be associated with strings used on the Web. This article explores use cases that support that need.

Read the article.

To send a comment, raise a GitHub issue.

The article Can we derive base direction from language? is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 1 April.

Sometimes people wonder whether it’s possible to obtain a definitive list of language tags which indicate a RTL base direction, so that there would be no need for separate direction metadata. This article looks into whether that is really feasible. (Spoiler: The W3C Internationalization Working Group believes it is not a feasible approach.)

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

CSS defines the typographic character unit as a basic unit of text for use with editing operations, however the meaning of that term can vary according to the operation, and there are issues in working with such units in complex scripts. In this article we look at examples of some of those differences and issues.

Read the article.