FW: Resources for language on the web

FYI.  Some user requirements!  From Nick Gassman at British Airways, who
I met at the W3C/NIST Usability Workshop last week.
RI


-----Original Message-----
From: nick.1.gassman@britishairways.com
[mailto:nick.1.gassman@britishairways.com] 
Sent: 08 November 2002 18:15
To: ishida@w3.org
Subject: Resources for language on the web



Richard, it was good to meet you again at the workshop. 

You'll recall that I spoke to you about a resource that I felt would be
useful, and thought I'd put virtual pen to paper to clarify what I was
talking about. It would be great if something like this could appear on
the W3C site (failing that, if you know of any other site that has the
information). I'll try to send you a separate email with comments on the
W3C site as you requested. 

The audience for the languages resoource would range from programmers to
ecommerce execs who need to understand the components that need to be
put together to result in a multi-lingual website. It would cover the
issues end-to-end, including:- 

1) how do I represent different languages and character sets on my PC
(or Mac etc...), because that's what I'm using to code my site.? 
2) how do languages relate to character sets and fonts. How can I tell
what I've got? 
3) what are all of the html (or xhtml, or xml) tags that relates to
languages, fonts, character sets. When should I use them? How do they
interact with each other? What are some use cases and examples? 
4) are these tags consistently implemented in the main browsers? 
5) how do I cope with right-to-left and up-and-down languages? 
6) how can I ensure that when I transfer my newly-authored web page to
may server, or when the customer downloads the page, that the encoding
is not lost? 
7) how can I maximise the likliehood that the customer viewing my page
will see the right things? 
8) how can I represent different languages on the same web page? 

It's probably not a comprehensive list. Most sources focus on a subset
of the elements, whereas the target audiences need to have 'everything
you need to know about producing multilingual sites' in one place. A
good opportunity potentially for a book also, I would have thought.

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

The W3C Internationalization Activity has restructured, and has issued a
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See http://www.w3.org/International/about.html

tel: +44 1753 480 292
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Received on Tuesday, 12 November 2002 06:39:35 UTC