Monthly Archives: May 2006
Posts
World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web
Molly Holzschlag, I18n GEO Working Group member, has published an article on A List Apart entitled World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web. She says “As our skills in markup, CSS and JavaScript improve, it’s a good idea for standards-savvy web professionals to begin exploring the technical and social issues within the internationalization realm.”
Internationalization Tag Set (ITS)
The Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0. Organized by data categories, the ITS 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. Last Call comments are welcome through 30 June.
Best Practices for XML Internationalization
The Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Best Practices for XML Internationalization. This document provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are internationalized properly. Following the best practices describes here allow both the developer of XML applications, as well as the author of XML content to create material in different languages.
New tutorial: Creating (X)HTML Pages in Arabic & Hebrew
Getting bidirectional text to display correctly can sometimes appear baffling and frustrating, but it need not be so. If you have struggled with this or have yet to start, this tutorial should help you adopt the best approach to marking up your content, and explain enough of how the bidirectional algorithm works that you will understand much better the root causes of most of your problems. It also addresses some common misconceptions about ways to deal with markup for bidirectional content.
At the end of this tutorial you should be able to:
- create effective XHTML and HTML pages containing text written in the Arabic or Hebrew (or other right-to-left) 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,and
- take decisions about the appropriateness of alternatives to markup.
CSS3 and International Text
Rewrote much of the text and slides to bring up to date with latest CSS draft work. Removed references to particular properties, since some of these have already changed, and others may yet. The tutorial now mentions typographic support planned for CSS3 in more abstract wording. Specification references updated to reflect restructuring by CSS WG. Updated the structure of the all-in-one version slightly. Changed the format of the slides, and produced new HTML version of same.
New article: Understanding the New Language Tags
The new version of BCP 47 is expected to shortly replace RFC 3066. The tags defined by ‘RFC 3066bis’ address a number of long standing problems with language identification, leading, hopefully, to richer language-aware features in our software and better support for language in our documents.
This article provides an overview of the changes in store for language tags. It describes the structure of future language tags, the current status of the work, and remaining work to be done. Author: Addison Phillips, Yahoo!
RTL content and browser chrome
This is a set of pages that examine how right-to-left and bidirectional text affects user agents outside of the main content area.
The tests seek to determine whether a user agent handles browser crome differently when the html, or the body, or the head element has the dir attribute set to rtl. Some user agents move the vertical scrollbar and display javascript popup boxes right-to-left in certain circumstances.
Introduction to Internationalization
Presentation by Richard Ishida at the opening of the W3C Office in Beijing, China on 27 April, 2006.
W3C® liability, trademark and permissive license rules apply.
Questions or comments? ishida@w3.org