Category: Update

The article “Script direction and languages” now has the title “What languages are written with right-to-left scripts?“, and provides insights into right-to-left (RTL) script usage around the world.

In a substantial revision, previous tables have been replaced with a completely new table which lists 12 scripts and over 200 languages using RTL scripts in the modern day. While it is only possible to give a rough idea of usage, the table includes information about which countries use those languages and figures for speakers of those languages. The data is gathered from the SIL Ethnologue.

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.

This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for fully justifying text on a line and in a paragraph for a variety of scripts, and offers some advice to authors and implementers.

The section about SE Asian justification was rewritten as South & Southeast Asian Writing Systems, adding more detail, and shows examples for Tamil of inter-glyph stretching (as opposed to inter-character).

An update for the article Declaring language in HTML has just been published.

This page describes how to mark up an HTML page so that it gives information about the language of the page. It begins with an overall summary, then provides additional details in subsequent sections.

The material was reorganised to expand the quick answer section and de-emphasise the information about XML/XHTML declarations.

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.

Until now, only Gecko browsers (eg. Firefox) provided support for CSS counter styles, but an update of Blink last week brought very welcome support to a much wider range of users (via browsers such as Chrome and Edge, etc.).

To coincide with this release, the Internationalization WG updated the WG Note Ready-made Counter Styles. This contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles to their CSS style sheets.

The changes include the addition of new styles for scripts including adlam, hanifi-rohingya, lepcha, meetei, santali, ethiopic and chinese. Instructions were also added for those wanting to use different suffixes or prefixes, according to the context in which the counter style is used.

An update for the article Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML has just been published.

This article 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).

The worked examples and the descriptions of markup have been moved to a new page: Inline bidi markup examples. 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.

Send any comments via GitHub.

An editorial update of Requirements for Japanese Text Layout has been published. The key changes include the following:

• Fixes for various errata, and improved wording in a number of locations.
• Merge of English and Japanese versions into a single document, with switches that allow readers to view the text in either language, or both. A particular language can also be requested via the URL (for example, like this: English, Japanese).
• Assignment of link targets to each list item and note, making it possible to point into the document in a more fine-grained way.

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編集上の修正を行った日本語組版処理の要件を公開しました。主要な変更点は以下の通りです。

・いくつかの誤りを訂正し、多くの箇所の表現を改善しました。
・日本語・英語版を単一ページに統合し、読者が各言語単独または両方を含む形で表示できるようにしました。(英語もしくは日本語表示のように)各言語単独で表示するURLも利用可能です。
・文書中の各リスト項目とノートにリンクアンカーを追加し、より細かく文書の特定箇所へリンクできるようになりました。

Types of language declaration describes how ‘metadata’ and ‘text-processing’ language declarations differ.

HTTP headers, meta elements and language information has been updated to read better, and the information that was to become the previously mentioned article was removed.

This article introduces a number of basic concepts needed to understand other articles that deal with characters and character encodings.

The article has been updated with explanations of the terms ‘user-perceived character’, ‘grapheme-cluster’, ‘typographic character unit’, and ‘glyph’, and a warning about the vague use of the term ‘character’.

Read the article Character encodings: Essential concepts.