W3C sets standard for internationalisation of XML content

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 4 Apr 2007 at 10:34

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) version 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, enabling creators of XML content to use the ITS set of elements and attributes to prepare schemas and documents for localisation and to internationalise them for a global audience.

ITS 1.0 addresses a number of internationalisation requirements, including: being able to identify the language of a piece of text; to specify the directionality of text, such as right-to-left Hebrew and Arabic or mixed directionality texts; to provide Ruby annotations, used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation; and to indicate whether content should be translated, an important requirement for people building tools to help with localisation.

With ITS 1.0, XML schema designers can build localisation-ready schemas at lower cost by reusing the predefined ITS 1.0 constructs, such as the 'its:dir' attribute to specify text directionality.

The recommendation also lets users improve the internationalisation of existing XML documents without modifying them - by describing how the features of the existing format relate to the corresponding ITS 1.0 features. Localisation tools that support ITS 1.0 can thereby be expanded to handle legacy content.

Richard Ishida, W3C's Internationalisation Activity lead said that the recommendation makes it much easier to work with document formats across international boundaries.

'It's all too common for international users and localisers to struggle with document formats due to a lack of internationalisation during schema design, he said. 'Developers may not know what's needed, or may only provide part of what's needed, and then do so inconsistently from schema to schema. ITS is there to help with this, whether you are creating a new schema or working with an established one.'

For more information see the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS) Version 1.0 specification.