Category: New resource

The article RTL rendering of LTR scripts suggests ways to produce runs of right-to-left text using HTML & CSS for languages that are nowadays normally written left-to-right. The use cases for this are rare, and mostly relate to academic descriptions of text in orthographies such as Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tifinagh, Old Norse runes, and a good number of other now-archaic scripts.

Translators are invited to provide translations.

Please raise any comments as github issues by clicking on the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of the article.

New sections, “What is internationalization” and “What the W3C Internationalization Activity does” have been added to the W3C I18n Activity’s “About internationalization” page.

The page is now also available in Chinese.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 2 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Perso-arabic Kashmiri Gap Analysis
• Uighur Gap Analysis

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.

A First Public Working Draft of Developing Localizable Manifests has been published.

This document provides definitions and best practices related to the specification of manifest files and similar document formats on the Web.

Some specifications on the Web deal with defining sets of files or resources to be consumed together. A common design pattern is to provide a manifest or configuration file that defines which resources are available and how various resources should be used or to provide various kinds of metadata about a collection of resources.

The document is still at a very early stage, and shows the intent, rather than reliable detail. Public comments are welcome, please raise them as github issues.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has published a first public working draft of an Internationalization Glossary. This document provides or points to definitions for various terms related to W3C internationalization.

As well as adding new terms, we plan to point to related definitions in other locations as the document evolves.

Please send any comments to the GitHub issues list.

The following two related articles have been updated, and one new article is published.

Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML looks at ways of handling text direction for structural markup in HTML, ie. at the document level and for elements like paragraphs, tables and forms. The article has been largely rewritten to take into account recent developments in HTML and CSS. A section was added to describe the use of logical properties. The text was made more concise.

Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

Inline bidi markup examples now contains the worked examples and the descriptions of markup that were previously in the inline bidi article. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Sometimes people wonder whether it’s possible to obtain a definitive list of language tags which indicate a RTL base direction, so that there would be no need for separate direction metadata. This article looks into whether that is really feasible. (Spoiler: The W3C Internationalization Working Group believes it is not.)

Read the article.

To comment on this article, raise a GitHub issue.

Information about text direction and language needs to be associated with strings used on the Web. This article explores use cases that support that need.

Read the article.

To send a comment, raise a GitHub issue.

CSS defines the typographic character unit as a basic unit of text for use with editing operations, however the meaning of that term can vary according to the operation, and there are issues in working with such units in complex scripts. In this article we look at examples of some of those differences and issues.

Read the article.

The CSS Logical Properties and Values spec allows authors to specify margins, captions, etc. using declarations that are valid without change whether text is horizontal LTR or RTL, or vertical LR/RL. Values have names such as -start/-end, rather than -left/-right.

These new tests look at support for values in RTL and vertical LR/RL contexts. They cover block size, margins, padding, border width/style/color/radius, caption side, & floats.

The test results, and links to the tests themselves, can be found at
https://w3c.github.io/i18n-tests/results/css-logical.html