New version of Internationalization Checker released

The W3C Internationalization Checker is a free service for web authors and developers that checks web pages and provides:

• a table listing key international settings for a page, such as character encoding, language declarations, and text direction.
• a list of errors, warnings and helpful suggestions about the page, with pointers to resources where you can learn more.

Version 2 of the checker moves away from checking against particular specifications to checking how a page will work in a browser. For the most part, it assumes that pages will be parsed using an HTML5 compliant parser. Pages served as application/xhtml+xml have some significant differences with regards to character encoding and language declarations, however, and these are taken into account if the checker detects that the page being checked is served as XML.

See the change log for detailed information about changes. In summary, 18 new checks were added, and the messages for 11 checks were significantly updated.

In addition, the following new rows were added to the information table:

• All language tags: lists all language tags used in the page. If you click on any of the language tags listed, you are taken to the Language Subtag Lookup tool, which provides information about validity of the subtags used, lists their meaning, and provides additional usage tips.
• Unicode control codes: lists directional controls used in the document, with a frequency count for each. The list is divided to reflect actual characters vs. numeric character references vs. named character references.
• Notable attributes: lists attributes used that are typically associated with features needed by an international audience.
• Notable elements: the same, but for elements.

Please let us know about bugs and missing features using the feedback form.