Monthly Archives: February 2007

The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 has advanced to Proposed Recommendation. Comments are welcome through 26 March. Organized by data categories, the ITS 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 can be used with new or existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.

The syntax of the code for checking UTF-8 was corrected. An ‘x’ was added before each hex nummber in the sequence which now reads ‘\x09\x0A\x0D\’.

The Polish translation was also updated with this fix.

The Internationalization (I18n) Activity has been renewed, and a new Internationalization Architecture Working Group chaired by François Yergeau (Invited Expert), has been launched. The group is chartered to work on the Character Model Resource Identifiers and Normalization and on Language Tags and Locale Identifiers.
The Internationalization Core Working Group is chaired by Addison Phillips (Yahoo!) and is rechartered to propose and coordinate technology to enable universal and worldwide access to the Web.
The charter of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Working Group chaired by Yves Savourel (Enlaso) and the Internationalization Interest Group chaired by Martin Dürst (Invited Expert) have been extended.
The Internationalization Guidelines, Education & Outreach (GEO) Working Group has closed and its work moved to the Core group.
Calls for participation have been issued for the Core Working Group and the Architecture Working Group.

Paolo Baggia of Loquendo has written a short article to describe Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) developments since 2004 related to internationalization. A series of workshops was held, leading to work on requirements for a new version 1.1 of SSML. A first Working Draft of SSML 1.1 was published in January of this year.

Results were updated for new versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera. Changes in behaviour were noted in IE7 and Opera compared to previous tests.

The third workshop aimed at internationalizing the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) was held in Hyderabad, India, on 13-14 January 2007. The summary and the minutes are now available.
This workshop was more narrowly focused than the previous workshops, specifically targeting languages of the Indian subcontinent.
The workshop was a success and the Voice Browser Working Group has started to review the requirements raised during the workshop with a view to improving international support in the SSML specification.

Thanks to Елена Неллсон (Elena Nellson) the FAQ-based article “Document character set” has now been translated into Russian (language negotiated).

Thanks to Елена Неллсон (Elena Nellson) the article “Character encodings” has now been translated into Russian (language negotiated).