Continuing the work of repackaging the tests in the Internationalization test suite around 87 more tests, this time relating to right-to-left and bidirectional text have been updated. Each of the 87 tests are implemented for HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html, XHTML 1.0 served as XML, and XHTML 1.1 served as XML (ie. totally around 350 test cases).

There are also tables covering the results of the tests, and summaries of the findings. Most of these are new. The tests were run on recent versions of major browsers.

The tests and results are linked from here:

Text direction tests

(Note that the vertical text tests are not included in this announcement, since they are still in the early stages of development.)

As part of the ongoing work of repackaging the tests in the Internationalization test suite around 70 tests relating to character encodings and language declarations have been updated. Each of the 70 tests are implemented for HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0 served as text/html, XHTML 1.0 served as XML, and XHTML 1.1 served as XML (ie. totally around 280 test cases).

There are also tables covering the results of each test, and summaries of the findings. The tests were run on recent versions of major browsers.

The tests and results are linked from here:

Character encoding tests

Language declaration tests

Thanks to Dénes Kohn, Metaphraser – Translation Company, the following articles have been translated into Hungarian. These are our first Hungarian translations on the Internationalization subsite.

Honosítás és Internacionalizálás (Localization vs. Internationalization)

Nemzetközi és többnyelvű weboldalak (International & multilingual web sites)

Szövegméret a fordításban (Text size in translation)

Read the Working Draft

The Internationalization Core Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Best Practices for Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts.

This document provides advice for the use of HTML markup and CSS style sheets to create pages containing languages that use right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Urdu, etc.

The Working Group believes this document is complete and does not anticipate any substantive changes. This draft is provided as a last chance for review and feedback before publication as a Working Group Note.

Please send comments on this document to www-international@w3.org (publicly archived) by 28 July 2009.

Editor: Richard Ishida.

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the article “Setting the HTTP charset parameter” has now been translated into Spanish.

Configuración del parámetro charset de HTTP

Thanks to K. Wiśniewski the Getting Started article “Language on the Web” has now been updated in Polish.

Język witryn internetowych

FAQ-based article: If I’m unable to use markup to correctly order bidirectional text, what can I do?

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

This tutorial was updated to incorporate changes made to the article What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup, but various additional changes were made, including a new approach to handling examples. For a detailed list of changes read the full post.

Translators should consider retranslating the whole tutorial.

The title was changed from ‘Creating (X)HTML Pages in Arabic & Hebrew’ to ‘Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts’.

This article was revised to provide more clarity. More examples were added, and a new approach was taken, using images for examples and providing links to live code.

The term ‘directional context’ was replaced with ‘base direction’, the meaning and impact of that was expressed better. It also shows a little more clearly the types of problem the bidi algorithm needs help with, and how the proposed solutions related to each other.

This article was revised substantially.

Translators should consider retranslating the whole article.

This article was revised to provide more clarity. More examples were added, and a new approach was taken, using images for examples and providing links to live code.

The term ‘directional context’ was replaced with ‘base direction’, the meaning and impact of that was expressed better. It also shows a little more clearly the types of problem the bidi algorithm needs help with, and how the proposed solutions related to each other.

Thanks to Ivan Baldwin the FAQ-based article “Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8” has now been translated into Bulgarian.

Променяне на (X)HTML кодировката на страницата с UTF-8