Fifth International World Wide Web Conference
May 6-10, Paris, France
Workshops: Call For Participation
WWW Internationalization
The goal of the workshop is to define the path that leads to support
for all the world's languages on the World-Wide Web. This implies
changes to HTML, HTTP, and probably many other things as well, such
as style sheets, URL's and forms. Therefore, it also raises questions
of deployment: what are the issues that keep internationalization
from being used, what are the facilitators? The workshop should
result in a recommendation to the World-Wide Web Consortium.
Workshop report
Latest Information
The latest information concerning the workshop: position papers, attendees, detailled program, will be made available by the workshop chairman at the following URL:
Format:
Full-Day
Workshop Committee
Organizer:
Bert Bos
bert@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People/Bos
W3C/INRIA
Chairman:
Steven Pemberton
Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl
http://www.cwi.nl/htbin/cwi.py?lastname=pemberton
CWI
Abstract
The World-Wide Web is well suited to American and Western European
documents. The character set for HTML pages is ISO Latin 1 (ISO
8859-1), which is already an improvement over e-mail, where anything
that is not ASCII has to be encoded and decoded carefully. However,
there are many languages that need more than Latin characters. As a
start, the next versions of HTML will have Unicode as their basic character
set. But internationalization (`i18n') is more than character sets:
the documents will have to be transported over HTTP, they may be
available in different languages, the presentation style may be
different based on the language, they may use fonts that not everybody
has access to, etc.
We invite browser and server developers, content providers (such as
publishers), and other people to participate.
The workshop will, hopefully, lead to a set of recommendations that
can guide Web development for some time to come, both as regards
technical development as well as deployment issues. Based on the
outcome of the workshop, the W3C will define its i18n activities.
Issues that might be discussed include:
- New tags in HTML, such as language and writing direction
(e.g.,
draft-ietf-html-i18n-02.txt)
- Server support for Unicode and the possibility of supporting other
character encodings
- URI's for file names with non-ASCII characters
- Language negotiation in HTTP: setting user preferences
and overriding them again (see
HTTP/1.1)
- How to help implementers
- Fonts: how to ensure that a reader can actually see international
text (see Fonts and the
Web)
- Style sheets ( Web
Style Sheets)
- Next activities
Position papers
Participants are expected to submit a `position paper'. A position
paper is a text that explains what your interest in the workshop
is. It can be a previously written paper, an argument for a particular
solution to an i18n problem, a description of the work you do, etc. It
can be anywhere from one page to as many as you need. It should also
help other participants to prepare themselves. Include as many
hyperlinks as you want, including those to your home page.
The papers will be put on-line. They will also be handed out to
participants at the workshop itself. Current goal is to have around 20
participants (and as many position papers). The workshop's organizing
committee is responsable for selecting the participants and may refuse
or invite people.
bert@w3.org, Bert Bos, Workshop Organizer
Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl, Steven Pemberton, Chairman
Last updated: May 7, 1996