Comments are being sought on the following new articles prior to final publication:

1. Handling character encodings in HTML and CSS
2. Essential definitions related to character encodings
3. Choosing & applying a character encoding
4. Character encoding declarations in HTML
5. The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML
6. Normalization in HTML and CSS
7. Characters or markup?

These articles have been derived from the former tutorial, which has already undergone a review. Since then, HTML5 has been brought to the fore in the articles and various small changes have been added, including some short summary information.

The three updated articles are the result of merging the tutorial material with existing articles. They are:

• CSS character encoding declarations
• Using character escapes in markup and CSS
• Serving XHTML 1.0

The character encoding section of the techniques page relating to HTML and CSS authoring has also been overhauled, to include the new material.

Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We hope to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

26-27 October 2010, Madrid. Hosted by the
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned for the coming two years.

As the first of the four events, this workshop will survey currently available best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information, see the Call for Participation

In addition to providing the basis for language identification on the Web, BCP 47 language tags also are used to control language and culturally specific APIs on many systems. Based on work done by the Unicode Consortium, the proposed Language Tag Extension ‘U’ provides additional subtags that can be used to refine locale-based details such as calendar, sort order, and other locale details.

More information on Unicode Locales is available at the Unicode CLDR website or in UTS #35, LDML.

Thanks to the DirjeWelry, the following have been translated into Hindi.

(X)HTML पृष्ठ को UTF-8 एन्कोडिंग में बदलने के लिए (Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8)

दस्तावेज़ वर्ण सेट (Document character set)

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

Creación de páginas HTML en árabe, hebreo y otros sistemas de escritura de derecha a izquierda (Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts)
Qué debe conocer acerca del algoritmo bidi y las etiquetas en línea (What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup)
Caracteres de control Unicode en contraposición a las etiquetas para compatibilidad bidi (Unicode controls vs. markup for bidi support)

Answers the question: Should I use b and i elements?

The HTML5 specification redefines b and i elements to have some semantic function, rather than purely presentational. However, the simple fact that the tag names are ‘b’ for bold and ‘i’ for italic means that people are likely to continue using them as a quick presentational fix.

This article explains why that can be problematic for localization (and indeed for restyling of pages in a single language), and echoes the advice in the specification intended to address those issues.

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

Comments are being sought on the article Using <b> and <i> tags prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We hope to publish a final version in one week.

This checker performs various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of internationalisation-friendliness. It also lists key internationalization settings related to character encoding, language declarations, text direction and class/id names. This information includes HTTP headers, which can be particularly useful for troubleshooting problems.

The checker is still only a prototype, so there are guaranteed to be bugs and missing features. It will slowly improve over the coming months, but it has been made available for use now since it is likely to be helpful to many people already.

Use the checker

Thanks to the Trusted Translations, Inc., the following articles have been translated into both European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Definir a codificação em aplicações de autorização web / Como definir a codificação em aplicativos de criação web (Setting encoding in web authoring applications)
Utilizando entidades de caracteres e NCRs / Uso de entidades de caracteres e NCRs (Using character entities and NCRs)
Conjunto de caracteres do documento / Conjunto de caracteres do documento (Document character set)

On 6th May Richard Ishida gave a talk entitled Internationalization & its challenges at the Technology, Standards and Internationalization Conference that was run to mark the opening of the W3C India Office in New Delhi, India.

The talk describes the work of the Internationalization Activity at the W3C, and ways in which people in South Asia can contribute to that work.