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 tutorial: Character sets & encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS
If a user agent (eg. a browser) is unable to detect the character encoding used in a Web document, the user may be presented with unreadable text. This information is particularly important for those maintaining and extending a multilingual site, but declaring the character encoding of the document is important for anyone producing XHTML/HTML or CSS. This tutorial will give you an understanding of the topic that will help you make the right choices when doing so. The topic is not as straightforward as it may sometimes appear, and the advice contained here is the end result of a great deal of thought and discussion.
After reading this tutorial you should:
- get advice on choosing an encoding for XHTML/HTML documents
- understand when and how to declare the character encoding (charset) for documents using XHTML/HTML and CSS
- have a grasp of aspects of serving and coding XHTML/HTML files that affect the above
- know when and how to use escapes and entities to represent characters
New article: When to use language negotiation
FAQ-based article: When is it appropriate, or not, to use language negotiation?
By François Yergeau, Alis Technologies.
New article: Display capabilities
FAQ-based article: Do I need to worry because display capabilities (screen sizes, number of colors, etc.) of computers vary in other countries?
By Lloyd Honomichl, Lionbridge.
New article: Apache MultiViews language negotiation set up
FAQ-based article: How do I use the MultiViews approach on an Apache Web server to automatically serve resources in the language requested by an HTTP request?
By Richard Ishida & Martin Dürst, W3C.
New article: Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM
FAQ-based article: When using UTF-8 encoded pages in some user agents, I get an extra line or unwanted characters at the top of my web page or included file. How do I remove them?
By Deborah Cawkwell, BBC World Service.
New article: Setting encoding in web authoring applications
FAQ-based article: How do I set character encoding in my web authoring application?
By Phil Arko, Siemens.
New article: Setting language preferences in a browser
FAQ-based article: How do I check or change the language settings of my browser?
By Richard Ishida & Martin Dürst, W3C.
New article: Checking the character encoding using the validator
FAQ-based article: How can I check that the character encoding of my document is correct using the W3C HTML Validator?
By Martin Dürst, W3C.
New article: Document character set
FAQ-based article: What is the ‘Document Character Set’ for XML and HTML, and how does it relate to the encodings I use for my documents?
By Richard Ishida & Martin Dürst, W3C.
New article: Ruby
FAQ-based article: What is ‘ruby’?
By Richard Ishida, W3C.