A draft of a new article, Styling vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Wednesday 8 March.

This article aims to help content authors understand the available options and features in CSS that support vertical text.

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.)

Note that some links don’t work because this is in a test location. No need to report those.

Ready-made Counter Styles contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles to their CSS style sheets. The content of this document was originally part of the CSS Lists and Counters specification, but is now published as a standalone document. It is expected that the document will be updated from time to time to include new counter styles.

This document points browser implementers and specification developers to information about how to support typographic features of scripts or writing systems from around the world, and also points to relevant information in specifications, to tests, and to useful articles and papers. It is not exhaustive, and will be added to constantly.

International text layout and typography index

We expect CSS specifications will point to this index in future where developers need additional information.

One of the new features in this FPWD is the addition of links to a github repository which tracks relevant discussion threads. That issue list contains pointers to threads of two kinds:

1. requests for information about how a script works
2. threads discussing implementation issues for typographic features in specs and browsers.

In the past it has been difficult to keep track of such questions, and hopefully this will help.

You can access the ‘tracker items’ by clicking on a link in the typography index (in which case you’ll see a prefiltered list specific to the section in the document), or you can go directly to the github repo. Here you can filter information by kind, by typographic feature, and by script.

The i18n WG welcomes suggestions for inclusion in the typography index, such as useful, reliable information sources and threads to track.

Déclarer la langue en HTML (Declaring language in HTML) by Stéphane Déchamps.

The Encoding Candidate Recommendation has been updated to take into account changes made to the editor’s draft since its previous publication as a Candidate Recommendation. These changes are largely due to issues discovered during implementation.

This is a snapshot of the WHATWG document, as of 10 November 2016, and if you wish to make comments regarding this document, please raise them as github issues against the WhatWG version of the spec. Only send comments by email to www-international@w3.org if you are unable to raise issues on github. All comments are welcome.

The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding.

The other (legacy) encodings have been defined to some extent in the past. However, user agents 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 addresses those gaps so that new user agents do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations and existing user agents can converge.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Ethiopic Layout Requirements.

This document describes requirements for the layout and presentation of text in languages that use the Ethiopic script when they are used by Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, and Digital Publications.

By publishing this first Working Draft the editor invites feedback and participation from interested parties. Learn more about other layout requirements initiatives in progress.

HTMLで文字エンコーディングを指定する (Declaring character encodings in HTML) by Kyo Nagashima.

The W3C Internationalization Checker is a free service for web authors and developers that checks web pages and provides:

• a table listing key international settings for a page, such as character encoding, language declarations, and text direction.
• a list of errors, warnings and helpful suggestions about the page, with pointers to resources where you can learn more.

Version 2 of the checker moves away from checking against particular specifications to checking how a page will work in a browser. For the most part, it assumes that pages will be parsed using an HTML5 compliant parser. Pages served as application/xhtml+xml have some significant differences with regards to character encoding and language declarations, however, and these are taken into account if the checker detects that the page being checked is served as XML.

See the change log for detailed information about changes. In summary, 18 new checks were added, and the messages for 11 checks were significantly updated.

In addition, the following new rows were added to the information table:

• All language tags: lists all language tags used in the page. If you click on any of the language tags listed, you are taken to the Language Subtag Lookup tool, which provides information about validity of the subtags used, lists their meaning, and provides additional usage tips.
• Unicode control codes: lists directional controls used in the document, with a frequency count for each. The list is divided to reflect actual characters vs. numeric character references vs. named character references.
• Notable attributes: lists attributes used that are typically associated with features needed by an international audience.
• Notable elements: the same, but for elements.

Please let us know about bugs and missing features using the feedback form.

The W3C HTML5 Validator has been enhanced with functionality that detects the overall language of a page. The validator can currently detect a little over 50 languages, but more will be added over time.

This makes it possible to compare the language of the content in a page with language declarations, and issue warnings if the lang attribute does not match the language of content, if no lang attribute is given at all, or if a language using a right-to-left script is detected but a dir attribute is missing from the html tag.

For more information on the lang attribute, see the Why use the language attribute? article, or Declaring the overall language of a page in the technique index.

A draft of a new article, Time & date, Essential concepts is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by 22 June.

This article introduces a number of basic concepts needed to understand other articles that deal with time zones and handling of dates and times on the Web.

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.)

Note that some links don’t work because this is in a test location. No need to report those.