Monthly Archives: March 2016

For twenty-five years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. The 40th conference will be held this year on November 1-3, 2016 in Santa Clara, California.

The deadline for speaker submissions is Monday, 4 April, so don’t forget to send in an abstract if you want to speak at the conference.

The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, May 13, 2016. Final presentation materials will be required from selected presenters by Friday, July 22, 2016.

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

This new article addresses the question: If my site contains alternative language versions of the same page, what can I do to help the user see the page in their preferred language?

This article is relevant for pages for which there are complete translations of the content. If your alternative pages have different content, or are regional variants rather than translations, you may need to do things differently.

Read the article.

The article is accompanied by a Swedish translation, thanks to Olle Olsson.

The following articles have been updated and reviewed by the Internationalization Working Group. If you have additional comments, please send them using the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom right of the page.

How to use Unicode controls for bidi text
see the changes on github

Unicode controls vs. markup for bidi support
see changes on github

CSS vs. markup for bidi support
see changes on github

Changes include the following:

* added a quick answer
* removed background sections now that we have other articles that deal with that information (pointed to those)
* clarified the distinction between structural/block markup and inline markup wrt control character usage in a new section
* expanded the section on inline issues to take into account HTML5-related developments
* introduced concept of isolation, including RLI/LRI/FSI/PDI
* removed out of date references and quotations
* introduced the concept of tightly-wrapping all opposite-direction phrases from the HTML article
* basically rewrote everything to make it cleaner, clearer and more snappy
* replaced outdated spec links and quotes
* added reference to polyglot
* pointed to the HTML5 rendering section rather than providing a CSS template (which was out of date) in the document

In addition to generally updating the information, the following changes were made:

• rearranged most of the material and rewrote the majority to make it more readable
• updated information about desktop browser settings
• limited that section to just a representative sample of major browsers
• removed ‘Finding and choosing custom tags’, since no longer relevant
• added information about mobile devices

See the updated article.

See the github commit diffs.