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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Recent Progress on Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)
Comparison of Unicode Programming Models in Programming Languages
ICU Overview: The Open-Source Unicode Library, v2.8
Presentation by Mark Davis at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 1 April, 2004.
Language Tags and Locale Identifiers
Presentation by Mark Davis & Addison Phillips at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 1 April, 2004.
Web Internationalization: Standards and Practice
An Introduction to Writing Systems: A review of script characteristics affecting computer-based script support and Unicode
Associating Character Encoding and language Information with HTML, XHTML and CSS Files
Presentation by Richard Ishida at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004.
Internationalized Software Testing
Presentation by Andrea Vine at the 25th Internationalization & Unicode Conference in Washington DC, USA on 31 March, 2004.
New article: Serving XHTML 1.0
Very briefly describes some, often surprising, aspects of how servers send XHTML to the user agent (eg. a browser), and how common user agents handle the markup they receive. This article provides background information that helps explain why some aspects of CSS styling don’t work the way you expect, and also sets the scene for the approach you should use for declaring encodings.
By Richard Ishida, W3C.
New tutorial: Using language information in XHTML, HTML and CSS
This tutorial was decommissioned on 4 June, 2007.
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 using language information appropriately.
After reading this tutorial you should:
- know how to apply language-specific CSS styling, where browsers support it
- have a general understanding of the concept of server-based language negotiation