Discuss: World Grows Small: Open Standards for the Global Web
by Molly E. Holzschlag
- Editorial Comments
13 Bidi Text and Language Codes
For those looking for help developing content in right-to-left scripts, the following may help: [url=“http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/”]Creating (X)HTML Pages in Arabic & Hebrew[/url].
Wrt language codes, note that RFC 3066 used to tell you how to create values for xml:lang and lang attributes. There is now a successor – it is approved by the IETF, but we are still awaiting an RFC number. The new IANA registry of codes is already available. See a recent article by co-author Addison Phillips on the W3C i18n site, [url=“http://www.w3.org/International/articles/bcp47/”]Understanding the New Language Tags[/url].
Hope that helps.
posted at 11:34 am on May 28, 2006 by Richard Ishida
15 Excellent article
Well done Molly. Internationalisation is often a very tricky field and one which I suspect the vast majority of designers/developers are not used to dealing with even though any site on the web is available to all. I imagine that if html was invented by a Frenchman (for example) and all tags were in French then we would all have a very different perspective on building sites and be much more aware of language choices.
posted at 04:12 pm on June 2, 2006 by Simon Cox
16 Are we talking about content or markup?
The only true method for writing international markup would be to define it in a database using XML. Why? Because it would allow each country to write the elements in their own language. Eg: <cat>yes</cat> for English, <chat>oui</chat> for French. This would then be converted to HTML, which of course is in American-English. Though I’m not sure if XML allows for kanji to be used in tags!
I though Internationalization applied to the content of the page – not the markup?
posted at 05:59 am on June 5, 2006 by Web Design Cornwall
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11 Untitled
The only true method for writing international markup would be to define it in a database using XML. Why? Because it would allow each country to write the elements in their own language. Eg: <cat>yes</cat> for English, <chat>oui</chat> for French. This would then be converted to HTML, which of course is in American-English. Though I’m not sure if XML allows for kanji to be used in tags!
As for emphasis in Japanese, they may use katakana, as explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Usage
“Katakana are also used for emphasis, especially on signs, advertisements, and hoardings… and words to be emphasized in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana.”
posted at 01:09 pm on May 26, 2006 by Chris Hester