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.

The article looks at a particular design and development practise that can cause major problems for translation of content. Many programmers and designers decide that if a particular string is used in many places, they will use copies of the same string rather than implement many identical strings. String reuse is not necessarily a bad thing. The trick is to know what constitutes a good candidate for reuse and what does not. If you get it wrong, you can be creating an insuperable obstacle to good localization.

Getting Started material. The W3C GEO Working Group has developed a set of Quick Tips to help newcomers to Web internationalization. They summarize important concepts related to international Web design in a similar way to the popular WAI Quick Tips. These tips are not complete guidelines, they are simply a few key concepts to bear in mind. The page also links to supporting material, where available, at the W3C’s Internationalization Activity subsite.

The document is linked from the new Getting Started page that also explains various ways to find information on the W3C Internationalization subsite, and points to some key definitions.

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.