An Introduction to W3C

1
Web Internationalization InitiativeManoj
JainDepartment of Information TechnologyMinistry
of Communication and ITGovernment of
IndiaAugust 3, 2006
2
W3C DIT
Department of Information Technology became a
member of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to
provide adequate representation of Indian
languages/ scripts in the various Web Technology
Standards being evolved by W3C Consortium.
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The project Web Internationalization Initiative
With the above mentioned objective DIT initiated
a project web Internationalization Initiative
for Indian languages in which C-DAC regional
units (Pune, Noida, Kolkata and Trivandrum) and
Industry Consortium for Language Technologies
(CoILTech-MAIT) are participating in various
activity working groups for evolving
specifications, guidelines, test suites,
developing translations and interoperable
technologies for the cluster of assigned
languages and organize sensitization workshops in
the region and promote participation of local
industries.
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• Indian Languages/ Scripts
• There are 22 constitutionally recognized
  languages in India. Apart from these 22
  languages, many more dialects are also spoken in
  various regions of the country.
• These 22 languages are using 12 different
  scripts. Some languages are written using one
  script e.g. Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Konkani,
  Sindhi, Maithili, Nepali Dogri languages use
  Devanagari script.
• Some languages are writen in more than one script
  such as Urdu, Sindhi, Manipuri and Santhali.

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WII ProjectImplementing agencies their
assigned languages
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Web Internationalization Initiative

• These centres to participate in various W3C
  activities.
• The present focus of the project is to
  participate in the Internationalization/
  Localization related activities.
• Encoding issues with respect to these languages
  are being addressed in Unicode forum.

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Web Internationalization Initiative

• CDAC, Pune is working on the Tag Set.
• CDAC, Noida has initiated a web based Discussion
  Board to build consensus among the experts.
• CDAC Kolkata has proposed a three tier Linguistic
  markup. This will help in Translation of tags.
  This is under discussion at W3C forum.
• CDAC Trivandrum is participating in Device
  Independence and XML related activities.

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.Web Internationalization Initiative

• MAIT-COILTech has been assigned the
  responsibility to interact with the Indian IT
  industry to get feedback on various issues and
  sample implementations.
• It also includes interaction with various
  browsers and other web tool manufacturers to
  ensure adequate support of Indian Languages in
  these tools applications.

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Localization Standards

• Encoding Standards
• Input Standards/ Keyboard Managers
• Fonts Rendering
• Locale Data
• Database storage Retrieval

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Internationalization/ Localization Some
important issues

• Content language It is very important to declare
  language in the content so that it can easily be
  searched/ rendered/ displayed.
• Presentation of the content Presentation of the
  content should be in such a way that it should
  reflect the cultural and traditional values of
  that region.
• Images Animation Examples in the Content Uses
  of the regional images, animation and example
  really makes the content viewer/ user friendly.
  Internationalized product should be able to
  handle this aspect.

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... Internationalization/ Localization Some
important issues

• Forms Databases and scripts that receive data
  from FORMs on pages in multiple languages must
  also be able to support the characters for all
  those languages simultaneously.
• This is very much relevant to the e-Gov
  applications being developed for Indian
  languages.

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• WII Project Tasks undertaken
• Character Encoding Issues
• Locale Specific Data
• Text Formatting Issues
• Font Rendering Issues
• Indian Language Tag Set
• Inputs for Mobile Web Initiative
• RFC-3066 for Identification of Languages
• Feedback on RFC-3490 (Internationalizing Domain
  Names in Applications (IDNA))
• RFC-3491, RFC-3492 RFC-3987 (PunyCode,
  Stringprep Profile and Handling path for
  Internationalized Domain Names (IDN))
• Reference Implementations of the draft standard
• Speech Synthesis Grammar

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General Formatting Issues

• Absolute/relative positioning, Layering, and
  Transparency
• Copyfitting
• Cropping and Scaling of Images
• Hyphenation
• Non-rectangular Areas

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Text Formatting Indic specific issues

• Alignment of scripts and baseline shifts
• Support for automatic alignment of text from
  multiple scripts with different alignment rules.
  Ability to handle sub-script and super-scripts.
• Justification/Word and Letter Spacing
• Justification/spacing policy controls.
• Sorting/Collating/Data processing
• Support for sorting and collating data (for
  example in index entries, but more generally
  wherever it is required for proper presentation).
  Support for other sorts of data-processing
  functions may be required as well.

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...Text Formatting Indic specific issues

• Fonts
• Indic languages are script-based languages, some
  of other issues with formatting of a document
  with these languages are
• Prefix, suffix, and stand-alone glyph variants
• No hyphenation (?)
• Justification (how to accomplished through the
  stretching of letters or syallables).
• Vowel relocation and/or resequencing

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ISO 639.1 ISO 639.2Codes for Representation of
Names of Languages

• ISO 639.1 ISO 639.2 are Two or Three letter
  Codes for Representation of Names of Languages.
• ISO 639.1 is a two letter code
• For example hi for Hindi and kn for Kannada
• ISO 639.2 is a three letter code
• For example mar for Marathi and san for Sanskrit
  
• There are few more Indian languages which need to
  be assigned the code such as Bodo, Apbhransh
  and Bundelkhandi etc.

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Language Tags RFC 3066bis

• Language Tags are used to help identify languages
  whether spoken, written, signed or otherwise
  signaled for the purpose of communication.
• Applications, protocols or specifications that
  use language tags are often faced with the
  problem of identifying sets of content that share
  certain language attributes.
• A Language Tag consists of a Primary Language
  subtag and a series of subsequent subtags, each
  of which refines or narrows the range of language
  identified by the overall tag.

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Internationalized Tag Set

• This is a set of elements and attributes, these
  can be used with Document Type Definition (DTDs)
  / Schemas to support the internationalization /
  localization.

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IRI URI

• IRI and URI are important activity towards
  internationalization / localization of the web.
  The e-infrastructure division of DIT is working
  towards Internationalization of domain names.
• CDAC centres under the WII project are to provide
  feedback on various RFCs issued by IETF, IDNA and
  IANA etc, so that these recommendations ensure
  Indian languages support adequately.

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RFC 3987Internationalized Resource Identifiers

• A Uniform Resource Identifier is a sequence of
  characters chosen from a limited subset of the
  repertoire of US- ASCII characters.
• The RFC3987 defines a new protocol element called
  Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI) by
  extending the syntax of URIs to a much wider
  repertoire of characters to cover all the written
  scripts of the world.
• Indian scripts are complex in nature. Study of
  IRI may be done from Indian languages
  perspective.

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RFC 3491

• RFC 3491 specifies processing rules that will
  allow users to enter internationalized domain
  names (IDNs) into applications.

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RFC 3454

• RFC 3454 specifies a framework of processing
  rules for Unicode text. This RFC mainly relates
  to the Internationalized Domain Names.

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RFC3492Punycode Encoding of Unicode for IDNA

• Puny code is a transfer encoding syntax designed
  for use with Internationalized Domain Names in
  applications. It uniquely and reversibly
  transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string.
  
• This is important for the implementation of the
  IDN in non-Latin scripts/ languages such as
  Indian Languages.

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Numeric Character References (NCRs)

• Escapes such as NCRs and entities are ways of
  representing any Unicode Character in Markup
  using only ASCII characters.
• For Example
• Character a in X/HTML as XE1 or 225 or
  aacute.
• These are useful for clearly representing
  ambiguous or invisible character and prevent
  problems with syntax characters such as
  ampersands and angle brackets. NCRs can be used
  for unsupported characters.

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Mobile Web Initiative

• W3C Group on Mobile Web Initiative
• In India, many people have started using mobile
  devices to access the web.
• Standard Keyboard Layout for inputting various
  Indian languages content on mobile devices are
  being evolved.

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Voice Browser SSML

• Voice Browser for Indian Languages.
• Speech Synthesis Markup Language to ensure Indian
  languages representation.

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Reference Implementations of the draft standard

• The project Web Internationalization
  Initiative, envisages implementation of the
  draft W3C standards for Indian languages/
  scripts.

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Others issues

• Display Font Rendering Issues
• Keyboard Issues
• Transliteration Issues

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• ???????.........
• Thank you

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Upcoming event.

• Bangalore being the major IT Hub in India a
  workshop on Internationalization/ Localization is
  also planned by during August 24-25, 2006 in
  Bangalore. More details at www.mait.com