The new version of BCP 47 is expected to shortly replace RFC 3066. The tags defined by ‘RFC 3066bis’ address a number of long standing problems with language identification, leading, hopefully, to richer language-aware features in our software and better support for language in our documents.

This article provides an overview of the changes in store for language tags. It describes the structure of future language tags, the current status of the work, and remaining work to be done. Author: Addison Phillips, Yahoo!

This is a set of pages that examine how right-to-left and bidirectional text affects user agents outside of the main content area.

The tests seek to determine whether a user agent handles browser crome differently when the html, or the body, or the head element has the dir attribute set to rtl. Some user agents move the vertical scrollbar and display javascript popup boxes right-to-left in certain circumstances.

Presentation by Richard Ishida at the opening of the W3C Office in Beijing, China on 27 April, 2006.

The Internationalization Core Working Group has released this First Public Working Draft. The draft includes mechanisms for identifying or selecting the language of content or locale preferences used to process information using Web technologies. It describes how document formats, specifications, and implementations should handle language tags, as well as data structures for describing international preferences.

The Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS). Organized by data categories, this 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 for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.

Updated to reflect latest user agent behaviour, and substantially reorganized to make maintenance easier.

Updated to incorporate latest browser results, and reorganized considerably. Doesn’t repeat the information in the test. Should make maintenance easier.

Added a preview facility to allow easier checking of font glyphs, and incorporated mention of separate settings in some UAs for Traditional Chinese in Taiwan vs. Hong Kong.

The W3C Internationalization Activity home page has been converted to a blog format. The blog supersedes the news filter pages, although the same categories as before will be used to group blog posts. The old pages will remain available as a historical record.
The new blog approach also makes it possible to easily host short articles with a comment facility, such as requests for public feedback.
If you had subscribed to the previous RSS feeds you will now need to subscribe to this feed.

The article looks at design and development practices that can cause major problems for translation. Designers must be very careful about how they split up and reuse text on-screen because the linguistic differences between languages can lead to real headaches for localizers and may in some cases make a reasonable translation impossible to achieve.