RE: MINUTES: GEO telecon 20031009

One of the purposes of our participation in the W3C I18N working group
and standards groups within the organisation is to continually improve
WS sites. We are keen to learn from the rest of the group as well as to
input into the group with problems that we face.

Jungshik is right in that currently we are only using utf-8 where there
is no alternative.  This is something we are regularly looking at and
will change over time where it becomes appropriate for our target
audience.
 
Regarding the 'lang' tag, we will shortly be implementing this across
our site, in this case to comply with our internal language
accessibility guidelines. We will also be evaluating (and feeding back)
how we are complying / can comply with the newly published "Authoring
Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization 1.0" (Working Draft).

Regarding your writing with the 'lang' tag suggestion and not receiving
a reply, I can only apologise. We usually try to respond to all
correspondence and are receptive to suggestions to improve our site.

Deborah



-----Original Message-----
From: Jungshik Shin [mailto:jshin@i18nl10n.com] 
Sent: 10 October 2003 02:54
To: public-i18n-geo@w3.org
Cc: public-i18n-geo@w3.org
Subject: Re: MINUTES: GEO telecon 20031009


On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Tex Texin wrote:

> Would it be possible to get some notes on the BBC W.S. concerns and
interests?
> If not for the list, via private mail... As an advanced international
user I
> presume it would be indicative of some of the larger problems that
need to be
> tackled.

  I'm interested in that, too. It's laudable that they use UTF-8 for WS
pages, but that seems to be about as far as they go in terms of I18N and
standard compliance.  I've just found that even that is only the case
of scripts for which there's no widely supported legacy encoding. Their
Chinese pages are in GB2312. Well, I can't blame them for using GB2312
for Chinese and Windows-1251 for Russian, but I'm now even less
'impressed' by the degree of I18N at BBC WS pages.

  A couple of times, I wrote to BBC that they need to specify the
language
with 'lang' (or 'xml:lang') for their WS pages, but I have yet to hear
back, let alone seeing it get fixed.

  Web pages of other news media are hardly better than BBC. For
instance, NYTimes.com uses Windows-1252, but most of their pages are not
tagged at all (or use a broken construct like 'meta http-equiv="charset"
content="iso-8859-1"' [1]) so that I almost always have to manually set
the
encoding (because my default is not Windows-1252). I'm wondering if
we can (GEO) do something about this (contacting web masters of those
sites wearing a kind of 'official' hat).


  Jungshik

[1] Yes, they claim that their pages are in 'iso-8859-1' although
they're
actually in Windows-1252. Most browsers can cope with this kind of
mistagging (ISO-8859-1 < Windows-1252, EUC-KR < x-Windows-949, TIS620 <
ISO-8859-11 < x-Windows-874, GB2312 < GBK < GB18030) having seen so many
of them, but I wonder where they picked up the idea of a separate meta
tag declaration for 'charset'.


BBCi at http://www.bbc.co.uk/

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Received on Friday, 10 October 2003 11:30:41 UTC