W3C "relaunches" internationalization activity

Good set of FAQs on multilingual pages, Unicode, etc.

[rjohara]

The W3C has relaunched its internationalization work at:

[w3.org...]

There are quite a few practical resources available there, including (an actually useful) set of FAQs:

[w3.org...]

[bill]

That's good news. Thanks for pointing it out.

Glancing through some of those older FAQ articles I see that UTF-8 encoding is only going to become more prevalent for multilingual sites. I'm glad to see this getting more formal treatment by a standards body as it will certainly make it easier for my work down the road. There is still a stigma about Unicode use in Asia unfortunately.

[rjohara]

Can you say why there is still reluctance in Asia to adopt Unicode, Bill? Is it browser support, inadequate fonts, or something technical about the standard?

I'm in the process of converting one of my site completely to Unicode. It is certainly going to make maintenance and development of good typography a lot easier.

[bill]

There are still a lot of legacy browsers and scripts in Asia that you need to be wary of. I think Japanese is reaching the level where it's safe to use UTF-8, but the Chinese government still recommends against it. They still insist on GB encoding to the best of my knowledge.

It really depends on the language group you're targeting. Only about a year ago I was still being warned by Japanese programmers not to go with Unicode for a web/database project. I hear similar things in the Chinese market. I guess you just need to keep in mind who your target audience is. If you're targeting a tech-savvy crowd then UTF-8 probably won't phase anyone.

The safest suggestion is still to use local encodings for Japanese and Chinese sites. Only a few years ago there were some real compatibility issues at stake. I think there are some lingering doubts about Unicode that were burned into developers in Asia, not all of which are valid in today's Internet.

[Rumbas]

Good stuff! Thanks for the heads up :)