In line with decisions taken by the Working Group several months ago, the editor’s copies of two Internationalization WG Notes have been significantly changed.

The information has been overhauled to bring it up to date with recent changes to various articles, in line with changes in HTML and CSS.

The new versions have also been paired down to a set of do’s and don’ts, with pointers to more detailed explanations in other articles on the i18n site, plus some introductory material that is not found elsewhere. This significantly reduces duplication of information, and thereby improves usability and maintainability of the content.

The documents in question are:

• Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts
• Authoring HTML: Language declarations

If you have any comments on these documents, please send them to www-international@w3.org before 12 April. We hope to replace the current versions of these Notes with the new versions shortly after.

Aligned with the MultilingualWeb workshop (7-8 May, Madrid), the LIDER project is organizing a roadmapping workshop 8-9 May. The 8 May afternoon session will provide a keynote by Seth Grimes and also focus on the topic of Wikipedia for multilingual Web content. Via several panels including contributions from key Wikipedia engineers, we will discuss cross lingual analytics and intelligent multilingual content handling in Wikipedia. On 9 May, a 1/2 day session will focus on aspects of migrating language resources into linked data.

Mark your calendar now! A dedicated registration form including ways to contribute to the workshop agenda will be made available soon.

Unicode CLDR 25 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world’s languages. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

Unicode CLDR 25 focused primarily on improvements to the LDML structure and tools, and on consistency of data. There are many smaller data fixes, but there was no general data submission. Changes include the following:

• New rules for plural ranges (1-2 liters) for 72 locales, plurals for 2 locales, and ordinals for 18 locales.
• Better locale matching with fallbacks for languages, default languages for continents and subcontinents, and default scripts for more languages.
• Two new locales: West Frisian (fy) and Uyghur (ug).
• Two new metazones: Mexico_Pacific and Mexico_Northwest
• Updated zh pinyin & zhuyin collations and translators for Unicode 6.3 kMandarin data
• Updated keyboard layout data for OSX, Windows and others.

This version contains data for 238 languages and 259 territories—740 locales in all.

Details are provided in http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-25, along with a detailed Migration section.

This update brings the article in line with recent developments in HTML5, and de-emphasizes information about legacy formats.

An attempt was also made to organize the material so that readers can find information more quickly, and also de-clutter the essential information by moving edge topics, such as UTF-16 and charset links, down the page. This led to the article being almost completely rewritten.

A new boilerplate and styling has also been applied to the article.

German, Spanish, Russian, Swedish and Ukrainian translators are asked to update their translation of this article within the next month, otherwise the translations will be removed per the translation policy, since the changes are substantive.

We would like to remind you that the deadline for speaker proposals for the 7th MultilingualWeb Workshop (May 7–8, 2014, Madrid, Spain) is on Friday, March 14, at 23:59 UTC.

Featuring a keynote by Alolita Sharma (Director of Engineering, Wikipedia) and breakout sessions on linked open data and other critical topics, this Workshop will focus on the advances and challenges faced in making the Web truly multilingual. It provides an outstanding and influential forum for thought leaders to share their ideas and gain critical feedback.

While the organizers have already received many excellent submissions, there is still time to make a proposal, and we encourage interested parties to do so by the deadline. With roughly 200 attendees anticipated for the Workshop from a wide variety of profiles, we are certain to have a large and diverse audience that can provide constructive and useful feedback, with stimulating discussion about all of the presentations.

For more information and to register, please visit the Madrid Workshop Call for Participation.

HTMLとXMLにおける言語タグ (Language tags in HTML and XML)

This article was translated into Japanese thanks to Momdo Nakamura.

An updated version of Declaring character encodings in HTML is out for wide review. We are looking for comments before 7 March. After the review period is over, this content will be copied to the same location as the current version of the document and the URL of the updated version will cease to exist.

The update brings the article in line with recent developments in HTML5, and de-emphasizes information about legacy formats.

An attempt was also made to organize the material so that readers can find information more quickly, and also de-clutters the essential information by moving edge topics, such as UTF-16 and charset links, down the page. This led to the article being almost completely rewritten.

Please send comments to www-international@w3.org.

We are please to announce that Alolita Sharma, Director of Engineering for Internationalization and Localization at Wikipedia, will deliver the keynote at the 7th Multilingual Web Workshop, “New Horizons for the Multilingual Web,” in Madrid, Spain (7–8 May 2014).

With over 30 million articles in 286 languages as of January 1, 2014, Wikipedia has now become one of the largest providers of multilingual content in the world. Because of its user-generated and constantly changing content, many traditional processes for managing multilingual content on the web either do not work or do not scale well for Wikipedia. Alolita Sharma’s keynote will highlight Wikipedia’s diversity in multilingual user-generated content and the language technologies that Wikipedia has had to develop to support its unprecedented growth of content. She will also discuss the many challenges Wikipedia faces in providing language support for the mobile web.

The Multilingual Web Workshop series brings together participants interested in the best practices, new technologies, and standards needed to help content creators, localizers, language tools developers, and others address the new opportunities and challenges of the multilingual Web. It will provide for networking across communities and building connections.

Registration for the Workshop is free, and early registration is recommended since space at the Workshop is limited.

There is still opportunity for individuals to submit proposals to speak at the workshop. Ideal proposals will highlight emerging challenges or novel solutions for reaching out to a global, multilingual audience. The deadline for speaker proposals is March 14, but early submission is strongly encouraged. See the Call for Participation for more details.

This workshop is made possible by the generous support of the LIDER project, which will organize a roadmapping workshop on linked data and content analytics as one of the tracks at Multilingual Web Workshop.

The MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group has been closed, since it successfully completed the work in its charter.

We thank the co-chairs, the editors, implementers and the Working Group for achieving the goal to publish Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) 2.0 as a W3C Recommendation, and for doing so ahead of the original schedule.

Work on enlarging the community around ITS, gathering feedback and requirements for future work will now continue in the ITS Interest Group.

Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML is a major update of the article formerly titled What You Need to Know About the Bidi Algorithm and Inline Markup, and reflects the recent changes in bidi markup in the HTML5 specification.

Technically speaking, the main change is that the dir attribute now isolates text by default with respect to the bidi algorithm. Isolation as a default is the recommendation of the Unicode Standard as of version 6.3.

For the less technical-minded, the main advantage of this change is a much simpler transition for both content authors and browser developers who want reap the benefits of isolation. At the same time, these approaches have good results for existing legacy content.