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The W3C Internationalization (I18n) Activity works with W3C working groups and liaises with other organizations to make it possible to use Web technologies with different languages, scripts, and cultures. 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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Updated article: Using character escapes in markup and CSS
In addition to various editorial improvements, the following significant changes were made to the article:
- A “Quick answer” section was added
- Two new subsections were added to the section about CSS escapes: “Using escapes with CSS identifiers” and “Sequences and backslashes”
For a detailed list of changes, see the GitHub commit log.
See the updated article.
New article: Strings and bidi
This article illustrates problems that can arise when strings are inserted into text and then displayed to users in different directional contexts: left-to-right (LTR) vs. right-to-left (RTL).
For review: Strings and bidi
A draft of a new article, Strings and bidi is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Tuesday 15 August.
This article illustrates problems that can arise when strings, such as those used in JSON or string-based data formats, are inserted into text and then displayed to users given different directional contexts: left-to-right (LTR) vs. right-to-left (RTL).
Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)
For review: Floating times
A draft of a new article, Floating times is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Tuesday 20 June.
This article answers the question: What is a floating time and how do I handle floating times in my Web application?
Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)
New article: Approaches to full justification
This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for fully justifying text on a line and in a paragraph for a variety of scripts, and offers some advice to authors and implementers.
Talk slides: JEPA seminar
On 17th March Richard Ishida gave a talk entitled
Next steps for Japanese script support
at a Japanese Electronic Publishing Association seminar in Tokyo, Japan. (The talk was delivered remotely.)
The talk describes work that has been done recently, or is currently under way at the W3C to address Japanese script requirements for the Web and for epublications, and proposes some next steps.
The talk is also available in Chinese (日文支持的下一步工作), thanks to Eric Liu.
Unicode Conference speaker submission deadline 24 March
![](https://www.w3.org/International/icons/unicode-logo.png)
The Internationalization and Unicode® Conference (IUC) is the annual conference of the Unicode Consortium where experts and industry leaders gather to map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas and present the latest in technologies and best practices for creation, management, and testing of global, Web, and multilingual software solutions.
The deadline for speaker submissions is Friday, 24 March, so don’t forget to send in an abstract if you want to speak at the conference.
For review: Approaches to full justification
A draft of a new article, Approaches to full justification is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Tuesday 21 March.
This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for fully justifying text on a line and in a paragraph for a variety of scripts, and offers some advice to authors and implementers. (For detailed information see the Typography Index.)
Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on the link “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)
New article: Styling vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text
The article helps content authors use CSS to create vertical text for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian. It also describes what currently works and doesn’t work in major browsers, and provides tests you can run in your own browser.
Publication of two ITS 2.0 related Note documents
The I18N Working Group has published two Note documents: Requirements for Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0, and Metadata for the Multilingual Web – Usage Scenarios and Implementations. The documents describe input to the development of, and usage scenarios for, ITS 2.0. The documents are not finished, but the group reached consensus to stop work on these specifications. They are being published as Working Group Notes for archival reasons, and show the latest snapshot of the document. In comparison to the previous working drafts, these documents only contain editorial changes. Further work items in relation to ITS 2.0 are being discussed in the ITS Interest Group.
W3C® liability, trademark and permissive license rules apply.
Questions or comments? ishida@w3.org