Language and Direction Metadata on the Web
Are you scared to support right-to-left languages such as Arabic or Hebrew? Are you frustrated by breakdowns in assistive technology or the availability of localized versions of your favorite software? What if there were simple effective best practices you could use to help?
The W3C I18N Working Group has been championing the standardized encoding of language and base direction metadata on the Web for many years now. Developers, designers, and standardizers don’t always understand the importance of having both in the display and processing of data.
This presentation contains a tutorial, showing the positive impact of having language and direction available and the problems that arise when they are absent, along with a deeper discussion about adoption and opportunities in Unicode and other standards.