Monthly Archives: February 2006

Getting Started material. The W3C GEO Working Group has developed a set of Quick Tips to help newcomers to Web internationalization. They summarize important concepts related to international Web design in a similar way to the popular WAI Quick Tips. These tips are not complete guidelines, they are simply a few key concepts to bear in mind. The page also links to supporting material, where available, at the W3C’s Internationalization Activity subsite.

The document is linked from the new Getting Started page that also explains various ways to find information on the W3C Internationalization subsite, and points to some key definitions.

The Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS). Organized by data categories, this set of elements and attributes supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.

Thanks to Jens Meiert the FAQ-based article “Localization vs. Internationalization” has now been translated into German (language negotiated).

Presentation by Richard Ishida at the Open Road Conference, Melbourne, the Victoria Online Seminar, Melbourne, and Web Standards Group meetings in Melbourne and Canberra, February, 2006.

The Math IG just published this Note which analyzes potential problems with the use of MathML for the presentation of mathematics in the notations customarily used with Arabic, and related languages. The goal is to clarify avoidable implementation details that hinder such presentation, as well as to uncover genuine limitations in the specification. These limitations in the MathML specification may require extensions in future versions of the specification.

The XHTML+MathML version displays the examples better, if your user agent supports it.