Fifth International World Wide Web Conference
May 6-10, Paris, France
Internationalization Workshop, 6 May 1996
Activities
This one-day workshop started with seven presentations selected from
the submitted position papers. These were:
- François Yergeau
-
Status of I18N and Internationalization of URLs
- John Larmouth
-
The Importance of Architectures, Models and Interfaces
- Martin Bryan
-
Maintaining Links between Translations
- Faith Zack
-
Server and CGI Extensions
- Tomas Carrasco Benitez
-
Web Internationalization and Multilinguism
- Jean Dougnac
-
Multilingual Software Architecture
- Gregor Erbach
-
Multi-lingual HTML/Multi-lingual Servers
After lunch we focussed on 4 areas for discussion. These were:
Fonts
Recognizing that there is already a font working group we focussed on specific aspects of fonts with respect to internationalization, such as
- The contrast between fonts, scripts and character sets
- Font identification and classification
- Combining font sets for display of texts in multiple languages.
URLs
We noted here a conflict between the need to represent a wide range of characters in URLs and the World-wide aspect of the web, and the difficulty of typing in a URL.
We recognised the advantages of the URN proposals, and regretted the apparent lack of progress in this area.
Some discussion arose over the use of UTF7 and UTF8 encodings, and there was a strong feeling that Latin 1 should not be used.
In any case it is the Query part of a URL that is most important at this time. It is regretted that current browsers do not support making bookmarks using the POST method.
We also note a confusion over whether URLs are a sequence of octets or characters. We recommend that they be defined as a sequence of characters, to clear this up.
Language Negotiation
We regretted that despite the fact that good proposals exist for language negotiation, virtually no browsers or servers currently implement them. We feel it a priority that this should change as soon as possible.
We propose that the quality factor be interpreted as a indication of the quality of a translation (for instance machine translation would probably be low quality) rather than the current definition which interprets quality as how well the user knows the language.
We note a need for a language preference list rather than just a single choice of language, with, for instance machine-translated English being less preferred than human-translated French.
We also discussed mechanisms for discovering the various language versions of a document that are available.
Multi-lingualism
It was unresolved whether there should be standards for authoring.
We discussed aspects of document delivery, multiple languages in one document, client-side extensions needed to support language choices in documents, and thesauruses to aid in multi-lingual searches.
Actions
We identified several immediate possible actions:
- An immediate recommendation to implementors everwhere: please use the existing definitions!
- Create resources:
- A tutorial explaining the issues, responsibilities, terminology, etc to a general public
- Create an overview of the state of the Web now, including a review of how current software reacts.
- Review existing proposals, in particular the new HTML and HTTP proposals, in the light of Internationalization.
- Migrate the WInter mailing list to W3C, and archive it.
- Create a proposal for internationalization of URLs
- Request that "Internationalization" become an allowable topic for submissions at future WWW Conferences.
Participants
- Martin Bryan
- Tomas Carrasco Benitez
- Lee Collins
- Shin'ichi Mukaigawa
- Jon Bosak
- John Larmouth
- Daniel Veillard
- Gregor Erbach
- Lonnie Mandigo
- Sara Baig
- Bill Smith
- Bob Briscoe
- Faith Zack
- Steve Zilles
- Martin Dürst
- Lori Brownell
- Nikolai Puntikov
- John Lardee
- Daniel Glazman
- Katalin Kolosy
- Glen Rippel
- Françla;ois Yergeau
- Jean Dougnac
- Mike Holderness
For more information
See the W3C i18n
page.
Contact Bert Bos.