The W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to ensure Web technologies work for everyone, regardless of their language, script, or culture.
From this page you can find articles and other resources about Web internationalization, and information about the groups that make up the Activity.
Read also about opportunities to participate and fund work via the new Sponsorship Program.
What the W3C Internationalization Activity does
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New translation: Wysyłanie XHTML 1.0
Thanks to Andrew Osobka and Natalia Fabisz the article “Serving XHTML 1.0” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).
New article: Language on the Web
Getting Started material: This is a second in a proposed series of pages that will introduce you to key internationalization topics and tasks, and direct you towards articles or resources on the W3C Internationalization subsite that will take you to the next level of understanding.
This document introduces topics related to declaring the human language of your content, and related topics, such as language-based styling, content negotiation, and user navigation.
By Richard Ishida, W3C.
New tutorial: Declaring Language in XHTML and HTML
Information about the language in use on a page is important for accessibility, styling, searching, and other reasons. In addition, language information that is typically transmitted between the user agent and server can be used to help improve navigation for users and the localizability of your site. This tutorial will help you take advantage of the opportunities that are available now and in the near future by declaring language information appropriately.
By following this tutorial you should be able to:
- recognize the available alternatives for declaring language, and how they differ,
- understand the difference between metadata about the expected language of the audience and the text-processing language,
- choose the best way of declaring language for your content
- locate information about how to specify language attribute values.
New translation: Dwuliterowe czy trzyliterowe kody języka
Thanks to the Tłumaczenia Angielski Team the FAQ-based article “Two-letter or three-letter language codes” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).
New translation: Dlaczego stosujemy atrybuty języka?
Thanks to the Tłumaczenia Angielski Team the FAQ-based article “Why use the language attribute?” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).
New translation: Ruby
Thanks to the Tłumaczenia Angielski Team the FAQ-based article “Ruby” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).
For review: An Introduction to Multilingual Web Addresses
Comments are being sought on the revised section of this article entitled Does it work? prior to final completion. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.
New Proposed Recommendation: InternationalizationTag Set (ITS) Version 1.0
The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 has advanced to Proposed Recommendation. Comments are welcome through 26 March. Organized by data categories, the ITS set of elements and attributes supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and can be used with new or existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.
Updated article: Multilingual Forms
The syntax of the code for checking UTF-8 was corrected. An ‘x’ was added before each hex nummber in the sequence which now reads ‘\x09\x0A\x0D\’.
The Polish translation was also updated with this fix.
Internationalization Activity renewed with changes to Working Groups
The Internationalization (I18n) Activity has been renewed, and a new Internationalization Architecture Working Group chaired by François Yergeau (Invited Expert), has been launched. The group is chartered to work on the Character Model Resource Identifiers and Normalization and on Language Tags and Locale Identifiers.
The Internationalization Core Working Group is chaired by Addison Phillips (Yahoo!) and is rechartered to propose and coordinate technology to enable universal and worldwide access to the Web.
The charter of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group chaired by Yves Savourel (Enlaso) and the Internationalization Interest Group chaired by Martin Dürst (Invited Expert) have been extended.
The Internationalization Guidelines, Education & Outreach (GEO) Working Group has closed and its work moved to the Core group.
Calls for participation have been issued for the Core Working Group and the Architecture Working Group.