W3C Internationalization Activity looks towards Africa

Richard Ishida represented the W3C Internationalization Activity in Casablanca beginning of June as a keynote speaker at a 3-day Pan-African Localization Workshop organized by the International Development Research Center. The workshop, the first of its kind, brought together participants from twelve African countries as well as experts from other continents to discuss how to better localize ICT into indigenous languages and scripts so as to promote rapid and fair development in Africa. The workshop was also visited by M. Rachid Talbi el Alami, Moroccan Minister-Delegate to the Prime Minister in Charge of General and Economic Affairs, and Carmen Sylvain, Canadian Ambassador to Morocco. Both expressed support for its aims. The workshop sets a foundation for future networking and information sharing via the development of a collaborative, Web-based site which will provide useful information and support the initiatives of a pan-African community of localizers.

Contributing to the workshop supports the aims of the W3C to increase participation by developing countries in the process of developing Web technologies. The W3C has recently revised its member fees to encourage participation by such countries.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has the goal of proposing and coordinating any techniques, conventions, guidelines and activities within the W3C and together with other organizations that allow and make it easy to use W3C technology worldwide, with different languages, scripts, and cultures.

Articles and Tutorials on International Usage of W3C Technologies
W3C's Internationalization Activity reviews W3C technologies in production for internationalization concerns. It also regularly publishes articles and tutorials relating to international usage of W3C technologies. For example, the latest article describes the use of the language tags to indicate the language of text in HTML and XML documents, as well as in HTTP headers, SMIL and SVG switch statements, CSS pseudo-elements, etc. The tutorials list covers the multilingual web addresses usage, the ruby markup and styling, the character sets and encodings in XHTML, HTML and CSS, and many more.

The Internationalization Activity welcomes the participation of individuals and organizations around the world to help improve the appropriateness of the Web for multiple cultures, scripts and languages.

Links:
W3C Internationalization Activity: http://www.w3.org/International/
Articles: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/
W3C Web Internationalization Tutorials: http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/
Language tags in HTML and XML: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/