Richard Ishida: Position Paper

W3C’s goal is a Web for All, regardless of language, script or culture. The Web community has made tremendous progress in internationalizing the Web over recent decades, but as Web penetration in language communities increases, as usage scenarios grow, and as new applications such as digital publishing emerge, there remains more to do.

W3C just launched the Internationalization Initiative [1][2]. Under the umbrella of this program we hope to increase participation in the W3C from experts around the world. We hope to learn about, describe, and work on, additional issues related to representation of text from the various languages and writing systems. We want to especially understand the requirements of those regions where we have had little input until now, but there is still plenty to be done on bringing other languages such as Japanese and Chinese up to the desired level of support. The work is directly relevant to eBooks as well as to Web pages.

I would like to describe recent developments at the W3C under the Internationalization activity, and help the workshop participants understand how they can intersect with that work. I would also like to ensure that we can integrate into this work any internationalization issues relating to digital publication layouts being discussed at this workshop.

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[1] https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/7156
[2] https://www.w3.org/International/sponsorship/