Web Internationalization
Standards and Practice

Abstract for the Web Internationalization Tutorial

The Web can be considered a single application, all parts of which must work together. To be a world wide Web, these parts must work for every country, language, and culture. Internationalization is important to ensure that users worldwide can equally benefit from Web technology.

This tutorial provides an introduction to internationalization on the World Wide Web. The audience will learn about the standards that provide for global interoperability and come away with an understanding of how to work with multilingual data on the Web.

Character representation and the Unicode-based Reference Processing Model are described in detail. HTML, XHTML, XML (eXtensible Markup Language; for general markup), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets; for styling information) are given particular emphasis. The tutorial addresses language identification and selection, character encoding models and negotiation, text presentation features, and more. The design and implementation of multilingual Web sites and localization considerations are also introduced.

• Unicode Character Encoding Model
• Character Encoding Negotiation
• W3C Reference Processing Model
• Language Identifiers
• Character Representation and Transformation: Quotes, Casing, Escaping
• Choices: Unicode versus Markup
• W3C Normalization
• String Indexing
• Numbered Listings
• Sorting
• Bidirectional And Vertical Text
• Ruby Text
• Multinational and Multilingual File and Directory Organization
• Language Selection

Continually Updated, Refreshed and Reviewed

This tutorial is continually updated to reflect the most recent versions of Web standards and the actual behaviors of the latest browsers (particularly Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator/Mozilla, Firefox and Opera).

The Web Internationalization Tutorial is reviewed by Web standards and internationalization experts on the Unicode Conference Technical Review Committee. The tutorial has been delivered at each of the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences in Dublin, Ireland (IUC21), San Jose, CA (IUC22), Prague, Czech Republic (IUC23), Atlanta, GA (IUC24), Washington, D.C. (IUC25), San Jose, CA (IUC26), Berlin, Germany (IUC27), Orlando, Florida (IUC28), San Francisco, California, (IUC29), and Washington, DC (IUC30).

The tutorial is updated for the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference, November, 2006, to reflect the latest version of the W3C Character Model for the World Wide Web, Internationalized Resource Identifiers (RFC 2397), International Domain Names, and the latest proposals for Cascading Style Sheets CSS 2.1.

Download the Web Internationalization Tutorial and Example Files

An Acrobat PDF file of the Web Internationalization Tutorial is available for downloading. This is the version presented November 2006 at the 30th Internationalization and Unicode Conference. The file size is about 1 Mb.

Right click the following link and select "Save As..." to
Download the Web Internationalization Tutorial.

The example files used during the tutorial are also available. They are collected together in a zip file of about 30kb.

Right click the following link and select "Save As..." to
Download the Example files.

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