Internationalization Working Group Teleconference - 18 December 2025

https://www.w3.org/2025/12/18-i18n-minutes.html

Here is the meeting summary:

Quick recap

The meeting focused on reviewing and discussing various documents and 
specifications, including the charter. The group decided to move two 
documents, String Meta and charmod-norm, to the REC-track in the new 
charter. We also discussed the need for testability in specifications 
and the importance of providing clear advice to authors. The WG agreed 
to postpone further discussions on search engine crawling and indexing 
to their next meeting on January 8th.

Next steps

Addison: Send email to Google/ECMA contacts regarding W3C activity wins 
and set up a call with relevant stakeholders (Bob, Mark, Novosha) after 
the holidays to discuss ECMA repo automation
Fuqiao (xfq): File an issue with RDF WG to propose adding a note about 
handling inline directional changes in RDF 1.2 concepts spec, 
referencing String Meta and Unicode/HTML resources
Eemeli: Present request for review/comment on TC39 262 proposal at the 
January 8th meeting
Addison: Ping PLH again regarding XML errata
Addison/Manish: Have conversation about locale
Fuqiao (xfq): Present request about search engine crawling/indexing and 
language negotiation article at next meeting (January 8th)
Fuqiao (xfq): Complete review of i18n request #286 (RDF semantics)

Summary

Year-End Meeting and Action Review

The team reviewed their agenda, including action items, information 
sharing, and radar pending issues. Addison added a topic on search 
engine crawling and indexing at Fuqiao's request. Addison noted this was 
their last meeting for the calendar year, with the next call in three 
weeks. The team discussed the importance of reviewing the charter within 
the next month, as they may only have one chance before submitting it to 
the AC. Addison mentioned sending an email to Martin but clarified the 
action item's goal was to receive a response, which was still pending.

ECMAScript Automation Progress Review

The team discussed progress on ECMAScript repository automation and 
reviewed several agenda items. Eemeli explained that while they couldn't 
effectively cover ECMA-402 integration in the last TC39 TG2 call due to 
time constraints, they could proceed manually for now. Addison agreed to 
add an agenda item for Eemeli's import text UTF-8 parsing proposal to 
the next meeting in February. The team also discussed item 187, with 
Addison working on an email to demonstrate the benefits of W3C activity 
and potential wins, though this would likely happen after the holidays 
with a call involving Bob, Mark, and possibly Novosha.

HTML Ruby Document Separation Agreement

The group discussed the relationship between the /TR/ruby/ and the new 
HTML Ruby extensions document, agreeing with Richard's comment that the 
old document should not be wiped out and should remain separate from the 
new one. They decided to formally document this consensus in the 
minutes, with Addison writing the proposal and requesting votes. The 
group also confirmed that the short name for the new document would 
remain html-ruby-extensions.

RDF Directionality and Unicode Handling

The group discussed RDF 1.2's new directional language tagged strings 
and how inline directional changes are handled. Addison clarified that 
strings in RDF are treated as strings without markup, and inline 
directionality is likely managed through Unicode. The discussion touched 
on how RDF's approach addresses string meta's concerns about defining 
the base direction and language of strings, though it doesn't delve into 
inline changes. Eemeli raised a question about potentially introducing a 
new Unicode directionality control to simplify the problem, which had 
not been mentioned in the string meta discussions.

String Metadata and Directionality Controls

The team discussed string metadata and directionality controls, agreeing 
that external metadata is preferable to inserting directionality markers 
into strings. They decided to add a note to the RDF concepts 
specification, similar to the one in string meta, pointing to basic 
introduction materials and linking to relevant articles about inline 
markup and bidirectional text in HTML. Fuqiao will propose the text for 
the note and file the issue with the specification team.

Document Track Status Discussion

The WG discussed the status of several documents, focusing on whether to 
move them from the REC-track to the Note Track. They agreed that the 
"Best Practices for XML Internationalization" document, written by 
Richard et al, should remain a Note rather than being promoted to a 
Recommendation, as it is aimed at authors rather than specification 
writers. The team decided to postpone any potential conversion of this 
document to the REC-track for a future charter, and noted that this was 
not a complete list of all their notes, with some older documents like 
Web Services Internationalization being intentionally skipped.

Charter Deliverables Selection Discussion

The WG discussed which documents to include as deliverables in their 
charter, ultimately deciding to propose only the Character Model and 
String Matching documents for the REC-track, while keeping other 
documents as non-normative guidance. They agreed to proceed with a 
two-stage approach where documents can be included in the charter 
without being immediately placed on the REC-track.

Received on Friday, 19 December 2025 00:57:00 UTC