Monthly Archives: February 2013

Comments are requested on the following proposed updates to material on the Internationalization site, prior to final publication. NOTE THAT the articles are in a temporary location, and will be moved to their final location after the review.

Text direction and structural markup in HTML
This article has been created from material formerly in the tutorial “Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts” and augmented with information about new HTML5 markup constructs that are beginning to see adoption. It should be regarded as a new article, focusing on applying bidi markup to document- and block-level situations and to forms.

What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup
This is an update of an existing article. It has been almost completely rewritten. The most significant changes are the new parts describing how to apply the new HTML5 constructs which are beginning to see adoption. Additional changes will be needed as HTML5 bidi markup is finalised over the coming months. The article also proposes a simpler way to approach markup of bidi text, particularly useful for those with less experience, that relies less on a deep understanding of the issues involved.

Visual vs. logical ordering of text
This is a new article created from material that has been removed from the previously mentioned material. It was removed into a separate article because visual ordering is much less important these days, and to avoid duplication. Only a few changes have been made to the content itself.

Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts
This tutorial has been modified to bring it in line with the current tutorial format. Rather than contain duplicate content, it now introduces the novice to key concepts and points off to useful further reading in an organized fashion. It has been completely rewritten.

Please send any comments over the next two weeks to www-international@w3.org (subscribe).

We hope to publish a final version shortly after that.

The program has been published for the upcoming W3C MultilingualWeb Workshop: Making the Multilingual Web Work in Rome, 12–13 March 2013.

Mark Davis and Vladimir Weinstein of Google will deliver the keynote presentation, “Innovations in Internationalization at Google”. This will be followed by one and a half days of talks on various aspects of what it takes to make multilingualism work on the Web, plus an afternoon of discussion-oriented breakout sessions that focus on best practices for various aspects the multilingual Web. Speakers will come from organizations like Adobe Systems, SAP, Yandex, the Spanish Tax Agency, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, Microsoft, Lionbridge, SDL, the European Commission, and leading universities and research institutions from around the world.

The program will also feature a showcase of implementations of the forthcoming ITS 2.0 specification that will allow attendees to get a sneak peak at how this specification will impact and support multilingual requirements on the Web.

See the Call for Participation for details about how to register for the workshop. Participation in the workshop is free.

Important: The deadline for registration is 8 March, but available attendance slots are filling up fast and are expected to run out before the deadline. So please be sure to register soon to ensure that you can attend.

The MultilingualWeb workshops, funded by the European Commission and coordinated by the W3C, looks at best practices and standards related to all aspects of creating, localizing and deploying the multilingual Web. The workshops are successful because they attracted a wide range of participants, from fields such as localization, language technology, browser development, content authoring and tool development, etc., to create a holistic view of the interoperability needs of the multilingual Web.

We look forward to seeing you in Rome!

The article The byte-order mark (BOM) in HTML was updated significantly to reflect the fact that the byte-order mark in UTF-8 is less problematic now than it used to be, and that it has a higher precedence than the HTTP header for character encoding detection.

The article was largely rewritten, and now incorporates the relevant information that used to be in the article “Display problems caused by the UTF-8 BOM”. That article has now been decommissioned.

German, Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian translations need to be updated. Translators, please contact Richard Ishida (ishida@w3.org) for the source text.