Scope of Mobile Web Best Practices and i18n

I was surprised to see no mention whatsoever of potential internationalization issues and best practices in http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-mobile-bp-scope-20050901/

Note that, in addition to best practices that will enable international use of documents on mobile devices (eg. ensuring a means of supporting right to left scripts, proper specification of character encodings, etc.), my work on software user interfaces makes me think that there are likely to be a good number of recommendations related to localizability of information for small displays. This includes such things as:
- when designing the page allow for text to expand in translation when the source text is in a language such as English or Chinese (use of tabs, graphics, and other mechanisms can be helpful in this respect)
- be careful about optimising memory and screen space by use of messages built from separate strings
- bear in mind that scripts such as Chinese, Thai and Arabic require more vertical pixels for glyphs than most Latin characters
- write compact but clear source text
- etc.

I hope that the Working Group will be able to work with the appropriate Internationalization Working Group to explore such topics.

RI
============
Richard Ishida
W3C

contact info:
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ 

W3C Internationalization:
http://www.w3.org/International/ 

Publication blog:
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
 

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2005 09:46:06 UTC