Getting Started with the W3C I18n site

This page describes ways to find internationalization resources on this portion of the W3C site.

It is particularly useful as a starting point for those who are new to internationalization and need guidance on topics to consider and ways to get into the material on the site.

Finding information on the site

Techniques index

The place to start if your question begins with 'How do I...'. Pointers to resources are grouped by task. Think of this like a table of contents for a cookbook.

Topic index

An index of resources sorted alphabetically by keyword. This is a good place to start if looking for fairly specific information. This is like an index at the back of a book.

Site search

At the top right of almost every page you can find a small field that allows you to search within the International Activity area of the W3C site. This approach can be particularly useful for finding references to very specific constructs, such as the AddCharset directive in Apache.

Resource type

There are also pages that group resources by type. This is particularly useful for finding such things as a list of articles, best practices & tutorials, or tests. There are also lists of reviews, mailing list archives, technical reports, talks, tools, and aggregated data sources, such as our Planet Web I18n blog aggregator.

A number of these links are listed in the right column of this page. More can be found at the I18n Activity Home Page.

Basic concepts & definitions

There are a number of articles of general interest on the site, defining key terminology. These include:

• Localization vs. Internationalization. What do the terms 'internationalization' and 'localization' mean, ands how are they related?
• International & multilingual Web sites. What is an 'international' or a 'multilingual' web site?
• Monolingual vs. multilingual Web sites. What are the trade-offs between international sites that are monolingual vs. multilingual?

Introductory articles

We have started developing a set of articles to provide newcomers with a gentle introduction to the resources available on the internationalization site. These articles cover some of the issues you should concern yourself with, and where to find the basic introductory information.

This list will grow as time goes by.

• Internationalization Quick Tips. Reminders of some key things to keep in mind when developing Web content.

• Character sets and encodings. How to choose and work with character encodings and escapes, and other topics related to characters.

• Language on the Web. Declaring the human language of your content, and related topics, such as language-based styling, content negotiation, and user navigation.