Minutes: GEO telecon 041208

More brilliant minutes from Deborah...

MINUTES: I18N GEO TF telcon, 2004-12-8 at 16:00 UTC/GMT, 9am Seattle, 12noon
Boston, 17:00 London, 18:00 Paris, 2am Melbourne


Attendees: 
Deborah Cawkwell (BBC) 
Andrew Cunningham (State Library of Victoria) 
Richard Ishida (W3C, Chair) 
Russ Rolfe (Microsoft) 
John Yunker (Byte Level Research) 


Apologies: 
Susan Miller (Boeing) 


AGENDA 
http://www.w3.org/International/2003/plan.html  


Additional Items: 

JY was introduced. He is a consultant in strategic globalization and
localization. His site is http://bytelevel.com ; his I18N blog is
http://www.corante.com/goingglobal/  .


Info Share: 

RI had attended Web Design World, Boston. Entertaining and interesting;
presenters focused on 7/8 high-profile people including Molly Holzschlag,
Jeffrey Zeldman. RI raised i18n points; he hopes to speak next time (March).
Voice of America contact: Richard Mathews, Internet Design Co-ordinator.

JY has just wrapped up a report about glob of websites. It's the second 2nd
such report. BBC World Service is in the top 20. There are a couple of
trends: increasing number of languages, better depth of content, higher
quality. Internally companies seem to be starting to prioritize it, but
there is a problem with a lack of funding. The report used four criteria:
(download) weight of home page in kb; global navigation consistency, breadth
and depth. The top ten were: Google, HP, AM, Phillips, Skype, Erikson,
PandG, Cisco, IBM, ETrade. ETrade is a bank which started localizing early.
It's probably one of few companies that does Chinese for US market. JY
emphasised that the report is subjective.

AC is working on papers for two conferences in February. One conference is
Info Online, whose audience is mostly Australian libriarianship. One paper
is I18N focused with some links to GEO work. He is also writing a training
package on web design, which will rolled out to different libraries.  The
second conference is on localization and looks at African languages to be
held in Addis Ababa. Interesting cross-reference with RI's conference in
Morocco. MathML interest.

AC is also working on getting libraries together for one-stop national
portal in a wide range of languages. He'll probably start that work on that
this month. Vietnamese search is problematic; 

Search. Google is not as effective as some of the search engines that exist
in Vietnam. AC's tests with Google require  search to be performed with a
number of different character encodings/keyboard inputs to capture all
results. Google seems to index in different encodings for different
languages; they are doing a lot of work on Chinese and Japanese. There was a
suggestion to gather key people to talk about search: what is currently
done, what needs to be done in the future. Currently web authors don't
always identify langs correctly, which is a problem for search engines. 


Meetings: 

Will have meeting 22 December. 
Next meeting after Christmas on 4 January. 
Send apologies if not able to make it. 


Review of GEO Work Items: 

Review and comment now 

Using non-ASCII characters and web addresses. MD to review. 
IRI spec moving forward, Submitted as RFC standard. 
New language-related tests and results. 
A decision was made to formalise lang declaration comments which need to be
addressed; some from Karl Dubost 
Still need to address the question of whether a single declaration could be
acceptable for the text processing language.

Usability testing and modification. RI got additional ideas from conference
for improving the site. 


In the pipeline, pre review 

FAQ How do I use the link element to point to different localized versions
of the document? AC - not started as has been inundated yet but shouldn't
take long.

Test Propose a list of tests to be created to support the current techniques
documents DC 2 jul - RI to change date. 
Test Position of meta charset wrt title element AC - done, but need to
retrieve. 
FAQ E-commerce sites and foreign currency LH - remove? 

Also coming up: 
DC Should I use Unicode? (see JY's list of companies now using Unicode -
http://bytelevel.com/global/unicode.html ) 
RR what is encoding? 
JY navigation 


Discussions: 

Comments on language declaration document 
1) terminology: document vs page 
ACTION RI to check usage 

2) The purpose of using metatag with attribute http content lang is not
clear. The document cannot be clear because usage is not clear. It is
furthermore problematic because of any discrepancy between how it is used
now and how it should be used in the future. Some more research would be
useful. RI to feedback from developer who had been using it.


ACTIONS: 

All GEO work items: http://www.w3.org/International/2003/plan.html
<http://www.w3.org/International/2003/plan.html>  
DC Should I use Unicode? 
RR what is encoding? 
JY navigation 
RI check usage of document vs page in language declaration document 


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Received on Thursday, 16 December 2004 17:35:45 UTC