Monthly Archives: July 2010

26-27 October 2010, Madrid. Hosted by the
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

The MultilingualWeb project is looking at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the Web multilingually. The project aims to raise the visibility of existing best practices and standards and identify gaps. The core vehicle for this is a series of four events which are planned for the coming two years.

As the first of the four events, this workshop will survey currently available best practices and standards aimed at helping content creators, localizers, tools developers, and others meet the challenges of the multilingual Web.

Participation is free. We welcome participation from both speakers and non-speaking attendees. For more information, see the Call for Participation

In addition to providing the basis for language identification on the Web, BCP 47 language tags also are used to control language and culturally specific APIs on many systems. Based on work done by the Unicode Consortium, the proposed Language Tag Extension ‘U’ provides additional subtags that can be used to refine locale-based details such as calendar, sort order, and other locale details.

More information on Unicode Locales is available at the Unicode CLDR website or in UTS #35, LDML.

Thanks to the DirjeWelry, the following have been translated into Hindi.

(X)HTML पृष्ठ को UTF-8 एन्कोडिंग में बदलने के लिए (Changing (X)HTML page encoding to UTF-8)

दस्तावेज़ वर्ण सेट (Document character set)

Thanks to the Spanish Translation Team, Spanish Translation US, the following articles have been translated into Spanish.

Creación de páginas HTML en árabe, hebreo y otros sistemas de escritura de derecha a izquierda (Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts)
Qué debe conocer acerca del algoritmo bidi y las etiquetas en línea (What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup)
Caracteres de control Unicode en contraposición a las etiquetas para compatibilidad bidi (Unicode controls vs. markup for bidi support)

Answers the question: Should I use b and i elements?

The HTML5 specification redefines b and i elements to have some semantic function, rather than purely presentational. However, the simple fact that the tag names are ‘b’ for bold and ‘i’ for italic means that people are likely to continue using them as a quick presentational fix.

This article explains why that can be problematic for localization (and indeed for restyling of pages in a single language), and echoes the advice in the specification intended to address those issues.

By Richard Ishida, W3C.

Comments are being sought on the article Using <b> and <i> tags prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We hope to publish a final version in one week.