PROPOSED Internationalization Working Group Charter

Deliverables

The formal documents produced by the Working Group are guidelines, best practices, requirements, and the like. These are best published as Working Group Notes.

The Working Group will not produce Rec-track specifications, but will maintain the following W3C Recommendations, should any changes be necessary:

Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 and Version 2.0

These specifications define data categories and their implementation as a set of elements and attributes. ITS 2 adds additional concepts that are designed to foster the automated creation and processing of multilingual Web content.

Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals

It provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web

Ruby Annotation

"Ruby" are short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This specification defined an XHTML module for ruby markup.

Language enablement

The WG will work with, coordinate, and publish documents for various task forces within the Internationalization Interest Group, which produce document layout and related requirements for the Web Platform and Electronic Book technologies. The aim is to produce documents similar to the Japanese Layout Requirements and gap-analysis documents for a range of scripts and languages, and other sources of information for implementers and content developers. See a list of currently available information.

Currently this work is managed through 13 repositories, typically each focused on a group of languages, where experts can discuss issues and requirements for support of their language or writing system on the Web. These repositories currently contain 28 gap-analysis documents (some of which cover multiple languages), from which 100 gaps have been identified for the pipeline dashboard which will help us determine and prioritise what needs attention. During the upcoming charter, the Working Group will guide this work forward, creating new repositories and gap analysis documents as needed to accomodate additional languages as issues arise and experts are available.

Developer support

Horizontal review of specifications of other W3C Working Groups for issues related to internationalization, global usage, and cultural sensitivity is an essential deliverable of the Internationalization Working Group. During the past 2 years the Working Group has reviewed over 80 specifications, and has tracked around 400 issues.

This is not a time-bound activity and the exact schedule of these reviews depends on the progress of other Working Groups and the availability of resources in the Internationalization Working Group. There is usually a regular supply of review work to be done. The WG is doing its best to provide horizontal reviews as early as possible in the specification development process, rather than waiting for Last Call. Review work leads to the raising and tracking of issues related to a technology. Discussions related to these issues are often much more time-consuming than the review itself.

In addition to discussions arising from reviews, the Working Group is often called upon to support other Working Groups with adhoc advice and discussion.

The WG will also maintain checklists and guidance in written form for developers of specifications.

Author support

The WG will continue to publish resources on the Internationalization subsite to assist users of W3C and related Web technologies to internationalize their applications, content, and services. These will include articles, tutorials, notes and reference pages.

Over the past 2 years, the group has published 5 new articles, rewritten or significantly updated 6 more, and created and/or published 8 Working Drafts/WG Notes containing detailed technical advice. (This doesn't include documents published during the language enablement work.) The group expects to continue this work during the new charter and create additional materials. These educational materials benefit both specification developers and content authors, and the choice of topics is driven by the needs that arise during developer support or by significant developments related to international use of the Web.

The Working Group will also maintain the W3C Internationalization subsite, and develop and maintain ways for users of its resources to quickly find the material they need, through a variety of means, including topic-based and task-based indexing.

The WG will also provide internationalization-related best practices for users of Web technologies. These documents make the information available in a task based fashion, and are accessed by higher level web pages, targeted at specific user types and activities, that group together and link to all relevant information in summary form, with an organization that aids their use.

Internationalization tests

The WG will build on the existing foundation to create additional test pages and summaries of results for the support of internationalization-related features in major browsers. The tests will be made available to the Web Platform test suite, where appropriate. These tests explore support by user agents for internationalization related features, but also serve an educational role. In addition to their support for techniques documents and articles, these tests are being used by content authors and developers of gap-analysis information. In addition, other W3C WGs have incorporated these tests into their own test suites, and user agent development teams from all the major browsers have used these tests for identifying, fixing or enhancing internationalization features or bugs in their browsers.

Outreach activities

The WG will seek to regularly present knowledge developed by the WG at conferences and meetings where Web internationalization topics are relevant. It will also seek out key opportunities to present the internationalization message to content authors and implementers, and to encourage the provision of requirements for internationalization of W3C technologies by in-country experts.

Timeline

WG deliverables are produced on an ongoing basis throughout the life of the charter, and the specific topics to be addressed by the working group and schedule information cannot be determined far in advance, but are driven by the needs and activities of the Web community.

Current work can be tracked using pages such as the following:

• the Review Radar
• the Review Comment Tracker
• the Language Matrix
• the Text Layout Issue Tracker
• the Article Pipeline

Success Criteria

• Successfully complete reviews and provide assistance in a timely manner.
• Maintain positive feedback for outreach materials.

Coordination

For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, performance, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review.

Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document.

Communication

Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Internationalization Working Group home page.

This group primarily conducts its technical work using GitHub issues in a variety of GitHub repositories. Notifications of activity in those repositories and meeting minutes are sent to the public mailing lists of the Internationalization Interest Group, which can be both read and written to by list subscribers (the Interest Group).

The group may use a Member-confidential mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

There is another mailing list, public-i18n-core@w3.org, which can be used for discussions within the group, where needed. This is a publicly archived list, writeable only by Group members. It is notified of changes to issues in the i18n-activity repo which we use to track review and other comments.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 3.3). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period from one week to 10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs or the Director.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 3.4, Votes) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 September 2020). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

Licensing

This Working Group will use the W3C Software and Document license for all its deliverables.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 5.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.