W3C I18N News: reviews

The W3C Internationalization Activity home page was converted to a blog format in April of this year. The blog supersedes these news filter pages, although similar categories will be used to group blog posts. The old pages will remain available as a historical record. The new blog approach also makes it possible to easily host short articles with a comment facility, such as requests for public feedback.

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Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to three weeks.

This article provides looks at design and development practices that can cause major problems for translation. Designers must be very careful about how they split up and reuse text on-screen because the linguistic differences between languages can lead to real headaches for localizers and may in some cases make a reasonable translation impossible to achieve.

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to three weeks.

Many programmers and designers decide that if a particular string is used in many places, they will use copies of the same string rather than implement many identical strings. The perceived advantages to this are to save on memory, to promote consistency in the source and, sometimes, to save on translation cost. The trick is to know what constitutes a good candidate for reuse and what does not. If you get it wrong, you can be creating an insuperable obstacle to good localization.

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to three weeks.

This article provides an answer to the question: What should I consider when upgrading my web pages from legacy encoding to Unicode encoding?

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to three weeks.

This article provides an answer to the question: When should I use xml:lang and when should I define my own element or attribute for passing language values in an XML document schema (DTD)?

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to three weeks.

By following this tutorial you should be able to:

• create effective XHTML and HTML pages containing text written in the Arabic or Hebrew scripts,
• understand the basics of how the Unicode bidirectional algorithm works, so that you can understand why bidirectional text behaves the way it does, and how to work around problems,
• take decisions about the appropriateness of alternatives to markup. [search key: tutorial-bidi-xhtml]

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

The article, written for internationalization novices, aims to answer the question: "How do I change the encoding of my (X)HTML pages to UTF-8?" [search key: changing-encoding]

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

The article aims to answer the question: "What are character entities and NCRs, and when should I use them?" [search key: qa-escapes]

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

The article makes suggestions with regard to best practices for using pull-down menus based on the select element to direct visitors to localized content. [search key: qa-navigation-select]

This tutorial (originally developed for the WWW2005 Conference in Chiba, Japan) is available for review. We are looking to release a stable version on the site in about one to two week's time. Please take a look, and if you have any comments send them to www-international@w3.org.

Some work has been done at the W3C on enabling support for ruby text in XHTML 1.1. This is especially useful for Japanese and other East Asian content. It allows small annotations to be rendered above and below base text, such as is needed to support Japanese furigana. This tutorial will introduce you to the basic mechanisms, and discuss the current state of the art with regards to ruby support [search key: ruby]

Previous review comments have been incorporated into this document, and a number of additional improvements made. We are looking to finally release it in about a week's time. If you have any comments, please send to www-international@w3.org.

The article provides a high level introduction to the current situation with regard to the use of multilingual Web addresses (URIs) for linking to resources on the Web. It is aimed at content authors and general users who want to understand the basics without too many gory technical details. [search key: idn-and-iri]

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org.

The article provides a high level introduction to the current situation with regard to the use of multilingual Web addresses (URIs) for linking to resources on the Web. It tries to avoid getting too technical, although it does attempt to explain some of the implementation detail in a simple fashion. [search key: idn-and-iri]

These tests explore how white space is handled in relation to ideographic text, based on assumptions in CSS 2.1. Please send any comments before I add them formally to the site.

1. White space 1
2. White space 2

See also the preliminary results and conclusions. [search key: sec-whitespace]

This is one of a set of pages that examine how inline bidirectional text is handled by a user agent.

Tests on this page seek to determine whether directionality set in the document is carried through to window title and tooltip display. The tester should check two things: whether the letters in a single word run in the right direction (this checks the application of the bidirectional algorithm, using character directional semantics); and whether the words are in the appropriate order (this checks the application of directional context set by the dir attribute). [search key: sec-inline-bidi]

See also the preliminary results and conclusions.