Re: Language Standards

Dear Varun

> On 17 Apr 2020, at 01:17 , Varun Varada <varuncvarada@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Coralie,
> 
> Ah, it sounds like there are quite a few associated legacy costs, but that it's a matter of effort at the end of the day. This can be easily solved, however. There is a script that converts articles/websites between the varieties of English that can take care of this with relatively no effort. Wikipedia uses this tool regularly to maintain its articles in a certain English variety.
> 
> Would you be opposed to exploring this option?

You submitted an interesting proposal.

I ran it by the people we are working with this year to redesign a subset of the W3C Website.

We concur that changing locale between US and UK (or other) English would be challenging. For example in the case of CSS we would not want to localise "color" to "colour" since that is not valid in CSS. Similar examples would probably occur all across W3C content, including pages that re-use W3C content elsewhere (e.g. documentation sites, online training, other references sites, etc.)

Using US English has been part of the website governance for W3C since 1994. I think most people would accept that. If we can't change it for specs like CSS so why do so for web content.

At the personal level, I’ll note that I make a conscious effort to use en-US when I write for the W3C site, while I’ve been taught en-GB (English is not my first language) and it’s the locale I use naturally and am happy to revert to when I use English elsewhere. 

With kind regards,
Coralie 

> 
> Regards,
> Varun
> 
> 
> On Wed, 8 Apr 2020 at 04:23, Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org> wrote:
> Hello Varun,
> 
> > On 6 Apr 2020, at 22:38 , Varun Varada <varuncvarada@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've noticed that the W3C uses US English not only on its website, but in its technical standards as well (e.g., "color" as a CSS property and "bgcolor" as an HTML attribute). Most of the rest of the world uses Commonwealth English, and the international community uses Oxford English (i.e., Oxford spelling) or British English almost exclusively, such as the UN, the IEC, the BIPM, CERN (the WWW's birthplace), etc. Seeing as the W3C is purported to be an open and international organization, it seems quite partial to use US English which is really only used in the US. Why is this the case? And can it be changed to make the organization more inclusive?
> 
> It is a convention that was adopted 25 years ago at the start of the Consortium.
> While I understand your concern, I would find this hard to change.
> 
> With kind regards,
> Coralie Mercier, Head of W3C Marketing & Communications
> 
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Varun

--
Coralie Mercier  -  W3C Marketing & Communications -  https://www.w3.org
mailto:coralie@w3.org +337 810 795 22 https://www.w3.org/People/Coralie/

Received on Friday, 17 April 2020 13:19:48 UTC