Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Unicode Consortium announced today the release of the new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (Unicode CLDR 1.8), providing key building blocks for software to support the world’s languages.

CLDR 1.8 contains data for 186 languages and 159 territories: 501 locales in all. Version 1.8 of the repository contains over 22% more locale data than the previous release, with over 42,000 new or modified data items from over 300 different contributors.

For this release, the Unicode Consortium partnered with ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, a project sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to help extend modern computing on the African continent. ANLoc’s vision is to empower Africans to participate in the digital age by enabling their languages in computers. A sub-project of ANLoc, called Afrigen, focuses on creating African locales.

For more information about Unicode CLDR 1.8, see the CLDR 1.8 Release Note.

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

Códigos de idioma de dos o tres letras (Two-letter or three-letter language codes)
Cómo trabajar con mensajes compuestos (Working with Composite Messages)
Reutilización de cadenas en contenido de script (Re-using Strings in Scripted Content)

Read the Working Draft

This document arose out of the frustrations of people who have to work with bidirectional text on the Web in everyday practical situations. For example, it covers issues related to re-use of fragments of text in various new locations by web apps or scripts, or situations where users need to type in or send bidirectional form data. It proposes additions to the HTML5 specification for such situations, which are not covered by the current HTML specification. Many of the ideas in the document, however, are also relevant to markup formats in general, and there are some implications for CSS and XSL-FO (which we hope to address more directly in a subsequent document).

Please send comments on this document to public-i18n-bidi@w3.org. Join the list and view the archive). We hope to publish a new version of the document, incorporating feedback, in about a month (depending on feedback received). We will then ask the HTML WG to review that version.

Editor: Aharon Lanin, Google.