Last Call Working Draft of Encoding, and two Authoring HTML Notes Published

The Internationalization Working Group has published three documents today:

• A Last Call Working Draft of Encoding. While encodings have been defined to some extent, implementations have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can converge. Comments are welcome through 1 July 2014.
• A Group Note of Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts. This document provides advice to content authors using HTML markup and CSS style sheets about how to create pages for languages that use right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Urdu, etc. It explains how to create content in right-to-left scripts that builds on but goes beyond the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, as well as how to prepare content for localization into right-to-left scripts.
• A Group Note of Authoring HTML: Language declarations. Specifying the language of content is useful for a wide number of applications, from linguistically-sensitive searching to applying language-specific display properties. In some cases the potential applications for language information are still waiting for implementations to catch up, whereas in others it is a necessity today. Adding markup for language information to content is something that can and should be done as content is first developed. If not, it will be much more difficult to take advantage of any future developments.

Learn more about the Internationalization Activity.