Dear Unicoders: The W3C Internationalization Activity is preparing new Working Group charters in order to continue and extend its activities. The goal of the W3C in this area, according to the current activity statement, is: "to propose and coordinate the adoption by the W3C of techniques, conventions, technologies, and guidelines that enable and enhance the use of W3C technology and the Web worldwide with and between the various different languages, scripts, regions, and cultures." The new charters are in an early draft stage. Ultimately these charters must be reviewed and approved by the W3C Management, W3C Advisory Committee representatives, and the Director.
This is an open letter inviting feedback on the charters, including areas that are not listed that need W3C attention, the proposed working groups, and the work that you would contribute on these projects. Draft versions of the new charters are available at the links at the bottom of this message. Links to the current charter and activity statement, for comparison, are also provided there. In the past, the Activity has been organized as a single Working Group, with various task forces that focused on special projects. The draft charters propose two Working Groups. The "Internationalization Core Working Group" (Core) will continue its focus on developing standards in the area of internationalization and reviewing W3C and related technologies for sound international design and support. The "Internationalization Guidelines, Education, and Outreach Working Group" (GEO) will focus on making the internationalization aspects of W3C technology better understood and more widely and consistently used. Below you will find a summary of the items currently being considered for the Working Group charters. Feedback, suggestions and comments are welcome (please use the [EMAIL PROTECTED] list for public feedback). Member-only or team-only comments should be directed to Martin DÃrst or Richard Ishida. Best Regards, Addison Phillips, Chair W3C-I18N-WG Martin DÃrst, I18N Activity Lead Richard Ishida, Staff Contact, I18N WG ----- New Core Work ----- The core working group's draft charter includes some new work items. These are generally related to the findings of the current Web Services Task Force: 1. WS-International. Develop a WS-* specification for describing in WSDL and for exchange in SOAP messages the international context and preferences necessary to enable internationalized Web services. Deliverable: Develop a specification and promote to Candidate Recommendation status. 2. Locale and Language Identifiers on the Web. Recent IETF activity is in the process of replacing the existing standard for language identifiers (RFC 3066), which has been widely cited in W3C specifications (HTML lang, XML xml:lang, XML Schema, XML Query, RDF, and many others). The changes in the RFC on which these are based require that policies and guidelines be developed for current and future specifications. In addition, in order to enable multi-locale operation of Web services and to create a locale negotiation layer for them, there needs to be a standardized method for identifying locales and locale preferences on the Internet. Deliverable: Develop a guidelines document for incorporating the RFC 3066 replacement into W3C technologies to be published as a Note. Deliverable: Develop a specification for locale identification on the Web and promote to Candidate Recommendation status. 3. Collation Identifiers. W3C technologies have struggled with the problem of collation, sorting, and ordering on the Web. These efforts have been hampered by lack of a clear, open, consistent, and standardized way of referring to collation sequences. Efforts to produce an Internet-Draft need to be re-energized Deliverable: Coordinate efforts to develop an Internet-Draft and submit to the IESG on the IETF Standards Track. ----- Continuing Core Work ----- The core working group's draft charter includes these items of continuing work: 1. Achieve 'Candidate Recommendation' status for the 'Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Normalization' (CharModNorm) 2. Achieve 'Proposed Standard' status at the IETF for 'Internationalized Resource Identifiers' (IRIs) 3. Finalize 'PR' status for the 'Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals' (if required: we are approaching this stage now) 4. Review of new W3C specifications and technologies. 5. Liase with other standards organizations as appropriate. ----- GEO Work ----- The GEO working group's charter is more outwardly focused and includes: 1. Web Resources. The WG will continue to publish material on the http://www.w3.org/International/ site to assist users of W3C and related Web technologies to internationalize their approach. 2. Techniques. The WG will build on existing work to create a series of documents providing internationalization-related advice for users of Web technologies. These documents, aimed at Working Group Note status, aim to make the information available in a task based fashion, at the point of need. The information in these separate documents will be drawn together by separate pages targeted at specific user types and activities, that group all relevant information in summary form with an organisation that aids their use. 3. DTD/Schema Localizability Guidelines. The WG will develop a set of requirements for developers of DTDs and/or W3C Schemas aimed at ensuring that documents produced are easily localizable. -------------- Useful Links: Proposed Draft Core Charter: http://www.w3.org/2004/06/i18n-recharter/core-charter.html Proposed Draft GEO Charter: http://www.w3.org/2004/06/i18n-recharter/geo-charter.html Current Activity Statement: http://www.w3.org/International/Activity.html Current Work Group Charter: http://www.w3.org/2002/05/i18n-recharter/WG-charter.html References for Web Services: Web Services Internationalization Usage Scenarios: http://www.w3.org/International/ws/ws-i18n-scenarios-edit/Overview.html Addison P. Phillips Director, Globalization Architecture webMethods | Delivering Global Business Visibility http://www.webMethods.com Chair, W3C Internationalization (I18N) Working Group Chair, W3C-I18N-WG, Web Services Task Force http://www.w3.org/International Internationalization is an architecture. It is not a feature.
