Technical Reports & Notes
This page lists documents with significant internationalization content that are W3C Recommendations or Notes, or are being produced using the formal W3C publication process. Not all documents listed are currently managed by the W3C I18n Activity.
Finalized publications
Standards
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Internationalization Tag Set (ITS)
3 April 2007. A set of recommendations for data categories that can be mapped to elements and attributes to support the internationalization and localization of marked up content. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument.
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Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals
15 February 2005. Architectural Specification building on Unicode to provide authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text handling on the World Wide Web.
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31 May 2001. "Ruby" are short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This specification defines markup for ruby, in the form of an XHTML module.
Working Group Notes
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Requirements for String Identity Matching and String Indexing
10 July 1998. This document was written as the first step towards a character model for W3C specifications, to make sure that the requirements of other W3C Working Groups (and of other interested parties) are understood and can be addressed.
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Authoring HTML: Handling Right-to-left Scripts
8 September 2009. Provides HTML/XHTML authors with best practices for developing internationalized HTML supported by CSS to create pages for languages that use bidirectional text, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Thaana, Urdu, etc.
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Requirements for Japanese Text Layout
4 June 2009. Describes requirements for general Japanese layout realized with technologies like CSS, SVG and XSL-FO. The document is mainly based on a standard for Japanese layout, JIS X 4051, however, it also addresses areas which are not covered by JIS X 4051.
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Legacy extended IRIs for XML resource identification
3 April 2007. For historic reasons, some formats have allowed variants of IRIs that are somewhat less restricted in syntax, for example XML system identifiers and W3C XML Schema anyURIs. This document provides a definition and a name (Legacy Extended IRI or LEIRI) for these variants for easy reference.
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Best Practices for XML Internationalization
13 February 2008. Provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are properly internationalized, aimed at both developers of XML applications and authors of XML content.
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Unicode in XML and Other Markup languages
16 May 2007. Provides guidelines on the use of the Unicode Standard in conjunction with markup languages such as XML.
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Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content
12 April 2007. Provides HTML/XHTML authors with best practices for developing internationalized content, supported by CSS, and focusing specifically on advice about specifying the language of content.
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31 January 2006. Analyzes potential problems with the use of MathML for the presentation of mathematics in the notations customarily used with Arabic, and related languages.
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13 October 2005. Discusses some of the problems encountered when working with the date, time, and dateTime values from XML Schema when those value include (or omit) time zone offsets. Many W3C technologies rely on date and time types.
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Requirements for the Internationalization of Web Services
16 November 2004. Developed to help achieve worldwide usability for Web services, these requirements address the way internationalization options are exposed in Web services definitions, descriptions, messages, and discovery mechanisms.
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Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios
30 July 2004. Describes internationalization usage patterns and scenarios for Web services. Provides additional guidance for implementers of Web service technologies, suggesting methods for dealing with general international interoperability issues in services and service descriptions. Provides a template for Web service designers to implement international capabilities in their services.
Non-W3C documents edited by WG members
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Internationalized Resource Identifiers (RFC 3987)
IETF Proposed Standard, 25 January 2005. IRIs expand the set of characters in URIs from a subset of US-ASCII to the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). They allow content developers and users to identify resources such as Web pages in their own languages. The IRI specification was in part developed by the Internationalization Working Group.
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IETF Best Current Practice, September 2006. Describes language tags and language tag matching for cases where it is desirable to indicate the language used in an information object. Comprises two IETF RFCs: RFC 4646 Tags for Identifying Languages and RFC 4647 Matching of Language Tags. The two editors of this best practice participate in the Internationalization Working Group.
Work in progress
Candidate Recommendations
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Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Resource Identifiers
22 November 2004. Architectural Specification providing authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for the use of resource identifiers building on Unicode.
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14 May 2003. "Ruby" are short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. This document proposes a set of CSS properties associated with the 'Ruby' elements. They can be used in combination with the Ruby elements of HTML.
Working Drafts
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18 June 2009. This CSS3 module describes how font properties are specified and how font resources are loaded dynamically. The contents of this specification are a consolidation of content previously divided into CSS3 Fonts and CSS3 Web Fonts modules.
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Web Services Internationalization (WS-I18N)
15 April 2008. Describes enhancements to SOAP messaging to provide internationalized and localized operations using locale and international preferences. These mechanisms can be used to accommodate a wide variety of development models for international usage.
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6 March 2007. This CSS3 module defines properties for text manipulation and specifies their processing model. It covers line breaking, justification and alignment, white space handling, text decoration and text transformation.
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Language Tags and Locale Identifiers for the World Wide Web
12 June 2006. Describes mechanisms based on BCP 47 for identifying or selecting the language of content or locale preferences used to process information using Web technologies.
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Internationalization and Localization Markup Requirements
18 May 2006. When creating schemas (XML Schema, DTD, etc.), it is important to include constructs that meet the needs of content authors dealing with international audiences, and address the needs of the localization community. This document provides a list of key requirements to achieve such a goal.
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Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization
27 October 2005. Architectural Specification providing authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for the use of resource identifiers building on Unicode.
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Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Characters and Encodings 1.0
9 May 2004. Provides HTML/XHTML authors with best practice for developing internationalized HTML supported by CSS, focusing specifically on advice about character sets, encodings, and other character-specific matters.
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7 November 2002. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. This draft contains the features of CSS level 3 relating to list styling.
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15 May 2002. The CSS formatting model provides for a flow of elements and text inside of a container to be wrapped into lines. This module describes the positioning in the block progression direction both of elements and text within lines and of the lines themselves. This positioning is often relative to a baseline. It also describes special features for formatting of first lines and drop caps.
Obsolete Specifications
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Framework Document for i18n Guidelines 1.0
17 April 2003. This is a discussion document produced by the Guidelines, Education & Outreach Task Force (GEO) of the W3C Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG). It describes plans for producing documents that provide guidelines on internationalization of W3C technologies.
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13 March 1998. Thoughts on how to mark the primary language(s) in a HTML document.