Web Internationalization: Standards and Practice

Tex Texin - XenCraft & Yves Savourel - RWS Group

Intended Audience: Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts, Content Developers, Site Coordinators, Technical Writers, Testers, Web Administrators, Web Designers
Session Level: Beginner

Benefits

Abstract

Attendees of this tutorial will learn about the architecture of the Web with respect to character processing and the facilities of markup languages for internationalization. The tutorial also identifies which features are currently implemented by browsers and which are not.

The Web can be considered a single application, all parts of which must work together. To be a world-wide web, these parts must work for every country, language, and culture. Internationalization is important to ensure that users world-wide can equally benefit from Web technology.

This tutorial is an introduction to internationalization on the World Wide Web. The audience will learn about the standards that provide for global interoperability and come away with an understanding of how to work with multilingual data on the web.

Character representation and the Unicode-based Reference Processing Model are described in detail. HTML, XHTML, XML (eXtensible Markup Language; for general markup), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets; for styling information) are given particular emphasis. The tutorial addresses language identification and selection, character encoding models and negotiation, text presentation features, and more. The design and implementation of multilingual Web sites and localization considerations are also introduced.

Topics covered include:

Continually Updated, Refreshed and Reviewed.

This tutorial is continually updated to reflect the most recent versions of Web standards and the actual behaviors of the latest browsers (particularly Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator/Mozilla and Opera).

The Web Internationalization Tutorial is reviewed by Web standards and internationalization experts on the Unicode Conference Technical Review Committee. The tutorial has been delivered at Unicode Conferences in Dublin (IUC21), San Jose, CA (IUC22), Prague (IUC23) and Atlanta, GA (IUC24).

The tutorial is being updated for the next Unicode Conference in Washington D.C., March 31 - April 2, 2004, to reflect the latest version of the W3C Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0 and the latest proposals for CSS 2.1.