On “Internationalization Considerations”

Some groups such as accessibility, security, privacy, and TAG regularly create or ask Working Groups to create special appendices in REC-track documents as a centralized place to collect limitations or enabling details for their specific area. These usually feature titles such as "security considerations" or "accessibility constraints". The Internationalization (I18N) Working Group has not historically sought to create such specialized statements, but a recent issue has raised the question of whether we should adopt a similar practice.

Why?

An "I18N Considerations" section would promote horizontal review, since the spec presumably would not be complete without the section and the statement would need approval by I18N.

Such a section could feature self-review checklist items (or links to the self-review)
Some implementations or users could benefit from a summary of issues unresolved at the time of CR (or other levels of document maturity)
Some issues cannot be addressed in a given document release. These considerations remain the topic of on-going work between the host WG and I18N (sometimes for extended periods of time). A considerations section can provide a means of documenting (and potentially attracting attention to) outstanding efforts.
Such a section would promote I18N awareness on a par with other horizontal activities.
There is some benefit to homogeneity between horizontal concerns.

Why Not?

An I18N Considerations section would require extra effort on the part of spec authors to create and maintain the section.

There is a tendency for these types of prose to become formulaic and thus uninteresting or ignored by the reader.
An imprecise statement might imply a higher (or lower) level of enabling than is actually found in implementations.
The "considerations" section is usually far removed from the affected section of the spec, making it easy for implementers and authors to overlook important items. (This is the so-called "I18N penalty box").
Some working groups may feel that internationalization issues are okay as long as they are documented shortcomings of the spec.
Creating and approving I18N considerations might engender an additional level of process and sign-off from the I18N Working Group than is currently needed.
Maintaining the considerations section might be difficult. During the course of spec development many issues can be resolved, requiring the section to be revisited. At the same time, work on layout requirements are steadily discovering new types of issues.

Recommendation

The Internationalization Working Group intends to continue with our tradition of not developing "I18N Considerations" sections for specifications except in exceptional circumstances. Even in these cases we recommend the use of in-line prose such as targeted notes or other health warnings, examples, or prose describing limitations, capabilities, implementation considerations, or authoring best practices. The I18N WG strives to provide ready references for complex issues so that spec authors can focus on the task at hand by providing links to our materials, cf. Charmod-Norm, LTLI, String-Meta, BP-Spec-Dev, Q&A docs, etc. etc. We feel that this approach's benefits outweigh the visibility of the considerations section.

That said, there are times when such a section might be useful and the sense of the working group is that we should consider requests for "considerations" prose where appropriate.