Re: Language Standards

Hi Coralie,

I was actually proposing 2 independent things:

   1. Convert the W3C website to en-GB-oxendict (Oxford English, the same
   variety used by almost every international organization such as the UN,
   ISO, BIPM, etc.). The script I mentioned would just need to be run on a
   website root page, and it would find all child pages and replace the
   instances of the text from those. It would know not to change the CSS,
   because it would parse the pages as HTML before modifying them. This is
   what Wikipedia uses in order to change the *content* of their articles
   to a specific English variety. It seems like the W3C's website is primarily
   static content, so it's quite straightforward to do so.
   2. Secondly and independently, I was also proposing modifying the
   standards to make the en-GB-oxendict spelling the canonical one and allow
   the current en-US spelling side-by-side for backwards compatibility
   purposes for some amount of time. It seems like the number of CSS, HTML,
   SVG, etc. attributes, tags, and keywords that would need to change are
   merely a handful, seeing as more than 90% of the web uses HTML5 and the
   number of keywords themselves which have alternative spellings are few. As
   for the implementation of these, it's actually quite straightforward to
   implement them, since I contribute to Chromium (the browser that Chrome and
   the new Microsoft Edge are based on), which accounts for more than about
   70% of all web browsers in current use. Regardless, even for the other
   browsers, implementing the new spec would be relatively trivial as it would
   be merely a few keyword changes in the code.

It sounds like the amount of effort this would involve is the primary
concern, which is why I was bringing up the tools with which this can be
accomplished with relatively little effort. Let me know your thoughts.

Cheers,
Varun


On Fri, 17 Apr 2020 at 08:19, Coralie Mercier <coralie@w3.org> wrote:

> 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/
>
>
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