Minutes: GEO telecon 041006

MINUTES: I18N GEO TF telcon, 2004-10-06 at 16:00 UTC/GMT, 9am Seattle, 12noon Boston, 17:00 London, 18:00 Paris, 2am Melbourne


Attendees: Richard Ishida (Chair I18N GEO), Deborah Cawkwell (BBC World Service), Andrew Cunningham (State Library of Victoria), Susan K Miller (Boeing)
Apologies: Russ Rolfe (Microsoft), Tex Texin (XenCraft) 

Scribe: Deborah Cawkwell

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


Additional Items:

None.


Info Share:

Skype internet telephony: information circulated. 
FY has been using successfully.
TT & NT plan to use.

AC: paper dealing with some I18N issues accepted for conference in Sydney in February 2005. Information Online is broadly aimed at information management professionals & universities; it's predominently Australian-based.

RI: I18N Core group character model. Split into three parts. Second section on normalisation needs further discussion partly due to recommendations about early vs late normalisation; in most cases early normalisation is most desirable, however, much work has been done which may preclude this. The normalisation document (CharMod Normalization) is not yet ready for publication, other documents (CharMod Fundamentals and CharMod Resource Identifiers) are very close to moving to PR and CR respectively.

RI: Tifinagh character picker (Link: http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/pickers/tifinagh/) - URL shows character in approximate order they will appear on proposed Moroccan keyboard. In Morocco, Berber is now being taught in schools & uses the Tifinagh script (other scripts are used in different locations for this language including Latin, Arabic). Tifinagh is being standardised with ISO & Unicode (to appear in the next version of Unicode due soon). IRCAM (Royal Institute for Berber Culture) is working on fonts and standardised keyboards & collation using Tifinagh.

RI: Reviewed XHTML 2, which is of interest to GEO. Core Group will look at results, then send to HTML Group. The new standard includes some interesting changes. He will post note & email core group when they're ready.   


Meetings:

Next week discussion re meeting time - daylight savings.


Review of GEO Work Items:

In the pipeline
Action all: please suggest additional pipeline items.

Action RI to compile list of suitable 'how to' documents which he thinks would be ideal for SM or others.

- FAQ How do I use the link element to point to different localized versions of the document? AC
Not yet done. Will schedule in next week.

- Test Propose a list of tests to be created to support the current techniques documents DC 
Done.

- Test Position of meta charset with regard to 'title' element AC
Done. Action AC to circulate.

- FAQ E-commerce sites & foreign currency LH
LH taking it easy following major illness. Pend.


Review & comment by email 

- Article Initial draft Using non-ASCII characters in Web addresses RI
See discussion below

- Tests Initial draft New language related tests and Results RI
DC & RI to discuss & parcel up test work on Friday 11am. AC offered help.
Tests required for main review, which should happen in one week.

- Techs Working draft Language Declarations RI
Second draft comments on techniques document. Tests need to be run.

- FAQ Wide review What is the difference between internationalization, localization and globalization? SM
Wide review version incorporates GEO comments. Circulated to wider I18N list. Comments received from Addison to be addressed with any comments from wider circulation. As this group normally responds quickly, this will be discussed next week.

- Techniques Usability testing and modification LF 
Done & circulated. Analysis from a general point of view, rather than using specific usability evaluation techniques. Comments should be made within a couple of weeks after which RI will start to implement the recommendations on the site. 


Discussion 

Article Initial draft Using non-ASCII characters in Web addresses written by RI.
http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/

Three issues for RI:  
1. using non-ASCII characters in web addresses 
2. couple of things he has no answers for - maybe someone else does? 
3. wide review or not? this could provide some answers 

DC query re "The domain name registrar fixes the list of characters that people can request to be used in their country or top level domains." Worries about languages with characters that didn't fit into that subset. They would have to contact the administrator. It would be difficult to administer 'unknown' languages. More of a social, than technical issues. There are other related technical issues. In China, domain names will automatically be provided in simplified & traditional Chinese. Way of avoiding spoofing etc. 

DC suggested a clarification note about the mix of Latin & Japanese characters in the domain name, especially as this is apparently quite common in Japan.

In the Does it work? IDN section, it would be useful to specify the countries of the codes. 
Firefox to be included in the UA support list. Also, action all to test on Safari & IE Mac (& note MacOs - 9 or 10 - as fundamentally different) and any other interesting UAs & send the info to RI within next couple of days. 

IRI
Discussion re test.
- Does the client send in the right format? 
- Issues around what locale server works in.
- Same address in UTF-8 & in Latin 1 pointing at same resource would tell us whether resolving properly on the client 
(above dicussion of test) 

Article to be reviewed next week after further work particularly on IRI section. Then it should be ready for wider review.


Discussions:


ACTIONS:

All: GEO work items: http://www.w3.org/International/2003/plan.html
All: please suggest additional 'pipeline' items.
AC: circulate test (Position of meta charset with regard to 'title' element)
RI: to compile list of suitable 'how to' documents & circulate.
All: to test non-ASCII links on Safari (& note MacOs - 9 or 10 - as fundamentally different) and any other interesting UAs & send the info to RI within next couple of days.
RI: circulate to core group notes on XHTML 2.

Received on Thursday, 7 October 2004 15:25:57 UTC