Update on World-Wide Web Consortium activities in internationalization
Bert Bos · 1997
The World-Wide Web (The Web) interconnects machines and people all over the world. It is steadily becoming better at representing all the different languages and cultures of those people, although much still needs to be done. The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is coordinating the development efforts in such areas as HTML, HTTP, style sheets, fonts, electronic payment, etc. This article gives an overview of some of the activities that are currently going on in W3C, in particular: XML, HTML, and CSS. 1 The World-Wide Web Consortium The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a consortium of about 180 companies and institutions from all over the world, who have come together to further develop the Web. The activities of the consortium are roughly divided into three domains, called Architecture, User Interface and Technology & Society. Architecture deals with the protocols between computers (such as HTTP), with the methods to identify documents and other resources (in particular URLs), with realtime audio and video, object-oriented data models, and mobile code. Natural language doesn’t play a large role in these areas, but there are still cases where the underlying technology needs to provide support for language-related features at the user interface level. For example, when a text document is transported over the Internet, the protocol must have a way of labeling the encoding and passing it on to the receiving end. The new language XML, for text-based representations of arbitrary structured data, is also part of the Architecture domain. Being text-based, it obviously does have many internationalization aspects. The User Interface domain contains the activities in HTML, style sheets (including CSS), graphics, fonts, and colors. Since all of these have direct interaction with human beings, internationalization is a key factor in their design. Technology & Society groups together the areas of privacy, digital signatures, electronic payment, demographics, disabilities, etc. This domain is probably the one where cultural differences are most obvious, especially since it is the domain that touches directly on politics, which tend to exaggerate cultural differences. Of course, none of these areas is completely separate from the others. The internationalization activity itself is an example: although it is officially part of the User Interface domain, it has connections to almost all areas. W3C recently opened offices in Japan. After the US (at MIT, Cambridge, MA), and Europe (at INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis/Grenoble/Paris, all in France), this is the fifth W3C site. It is hosted by Keio University in Tokyo. One of the tasks for the new team is internationalization for the “CJK” (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.