The Internationalization Core Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization to improve text manipulation on the Web. Based on the character model Fundamentals W3C Recommendation, the draft provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for text normalization and string identity matching.

FAQ-based article: How do I change the encoding of my (X)HTML pages to UTF-8?

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org. We expect to publish a final version in one to three weeks.

By following this tutorial you should be able to:

• create effective XHTML and HTML pages containing text written in the Arabic or Hebrew (or other right-to-left) scripts,
• understand the basics of how the Unicode bidirectional algorithm works, so that you can understand why bidirectional text behaves the way it does, and how to work around problems,
• take decisions about the appropriateness of alternatives to markup.

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FAQ-based article: What are character entities and NCRs, and when should I use them?

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

When creating schemas (XML Schema, DTD, etc.), it is important to include constructs that meet the needs of content authors dealing with international audiences, and address the needs of the localization community. This document provides a list of key requirements to achieve such a goal. It will be used to provide a framework and direction for a detailed solution proposal (or set of proposals) to be developed later.

Editor: Yves Savourel.

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FAQ-based article: What are the best practices for using pull-down menus based on the select element to direct visitors to localized content?

By Richard Ishida, W3C & John Yunker, Byte Level Research.

Ruby is a name for small annotations that are rendered alongside base text. This is especially useful for Japanese and other East Asian content (ruby is known as furigana in Japanese). The Ruby Annotation specification provides a way to mark up ruby text, and has been adopted as an XHTML 1.1 module. Work is under way in CSS3 on mechanisms to support styling of ruby text. This article will introduce you to the basic mechanisms, and discuss the current state of the art with regards to ruby support.

This tutorial was decommissioned on 4 June, 2007.

A Web address is used to point to a resource on the Web such as a Web page. Recent developments enable you to add non-ASCII characters to Web addresses. This tutorial provides a high level introduction to how this works, and reviews current support on mainstream browsers.

After reading this tutorial you should:

• understand how domain names containing non-ASCII text are handled, according to the IDN specifications
• understand how path names containing non-ASCII text in Web addresses are handled, according to the IRI specification
• get a general idea of how well multilingual Web addresses are supported for use in major browsers

Presentation by Richard Ishida at Technical Plenary in Boston, USA in March, 2005.

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Language tags are used to indicate the language of text in HTML and XML documents, and are also used in HTTP headers, SMIL and SVG switch statements, CSS pseudo-elements, etc. This article describes how to choose values for language tags.

By Richard Ishida & Martin Dürst, W3C.