The W3C Internationalization Initiative

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 adoption in language communities increases, as usage scenarios grow, and as new applications such as digital publishing emerge, there remains more to do.

For the Web to truly work for stakeholders all around the world, there must be a collaboration of language experts, Web site designers, developers, and vendors who are active in moving the Web forward. To ensure a rapid response to the growth of the Web, the W3C wants to marshal the resources of organizations and experts who care about these problems and enlist their help in strengthening internationalization support for the Web.

To accelerate progress in this area, the W3C invites sponsorship to supplement the core funding it receives from W3C Member fees, so that it can increase in-house resources dedicated to this work.

Success in meeting these goals requires participation and funding from language, developer, and author communities, in order to expand the effort over and above what can be achieved with our core funding.

Language enablement – Stakeholders include governments, publishers, community groups, etc., who use the language. Typical activities include gap-analysis & prioritization, and documenting requirements.
Developer support – Stakeholders include tech companies building the infrastructure for a global Web and supporting W3C standards groups. Typical activities include creating guidelines & checklists, reviewing specifications, and developing architectural solutions.
Author support – Stakeholders include people creating Web content in their own language, as well as companies building or localizing Web sites for multiple languages. Typical activities include developing educational resources, outreach, and checker tools.

The Web needs your help

This expansion of our core work is achieved via a Sponsorship Program with the following levels.

	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum
Commitment (US$/year)	10,000	25,000	50,000	100,000
Badges with which to promote role as sponsors of W3C Internationalization	✓	✓	✓	✓
Opportunity to designate up to half of the funding toward specified goals or projects	-	✓	✓	✓
A seat on the Internationalization Review Board	-	-	✓	✓

The Internationalization Review Board is chaired by W3C Staff and Sponsorship Program partners. It meets twice a year and reviews plans and progress, advises on new directions, and liaises with the broader internationalization community.

In addition to sponsorship funding, the W3C hopes stakeholders will help by enabling access to language and technical experts. It is important for people around the world to contribute to building the international Web on behalf of their own communities, and also for those who are developing Web technologies to ensure that technical solutions don't push developing regions into second-class citizens on the Web.

When someone gets connectivity but then finds their own language poorly supported, they don't have equal access to the Web. We will only truly connect all communities once the Web supports rich communication in all languages. Achieving that requires assessment of the current situation, support for technical work that can close gaps, and education about available techniques for implementing local content. Please help us achieve that.

Language enablement

The W3C wants to ensure that local requirements for language support on the Web are identified and addressed. Text layout is an area of particular interest, and is concerned with things such as rules for line-breaking & justification, local approaches to expressing emphasis or decorating text, localizing counter styles, supporting bidirectional text in markup, initial-letter styling, hyphenation, page layout, and so on. These typographic conventions are often very different from the Western norm in languages that use writing systems such as Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Mongolian, and so forth.

In Web pages and in digital publishing, needs can be addressed by improving W3C standards for rendering text (such as CSS, WebVTT, SVG, etc.), and markup (such as HTML). The goal here is to ensure that the Web supports the native typographic features that reflect the cultural heritage of users around the world, and enable users to interact with the Web in line with long-standing print traditions. The language matrix captures an overview of where work is needed.

To achieve this goal, the W3C needs to assess current support for the world's languages on the Web, identify gaps, prioritize them, develop requirements, and then take steps to close the gaps. To do so, it needs to establish a network of experts who can advise on language-related requirements, and increase resources available to facilitate the work in this area.

Developer support

A core focus for the W3C is to support creators of specifications, of system-level tools (e.g., browsers, printers), and of user-level tools (e.g., wysiwyg editors), by helping them understand and implement support for international features. Enhanced support is now required due to:

the increase in the number of specifications to be reviewed,
increased complexity and diversity in specs,
complex standardization needs of particular vertical industries, such as Government data, Digital publishing, Entertainment, etc., and
the need to provide developers with better guidelines for implementing, and better tools for reviewing and evaluating international support in their technologies.

Plans to provide additional support include accelerated development of guidelines and checklists, in order to remove review bottlenecks and disseminate information more effectively. They also include more investigations into ways of meeting internationalization requirements in new areas of technology and tooling.

Author support

With a global economy there is a greater urgency to support local content needs. We want to ensure that people in all regions of the world understand how to use the international features that are available on the Web.

This is also relevant for increasing translated/localized content. Although there is a significant dependency on business factors (ROI, market share, cost/resource constraints) here, the degree of success and the quality of the localization can also be helped by readily available and authoritative information around how to use international features of the Web.

Goals in this area include:

increasing the use of local features such as ruby, vertical text, counter-styles, local forms of emphasis, and so on,
reducing the complexity of markup for bidirectional text in pages using right-to-left scripts,
increasing the quality of localizations.

This will be achieved through expanding our work on educational and outreach materials, and seeding or developing information for aligned educational resources or courses for content developers. We also aim to create and improve tools to support content creators and localizers working with languages around the world.