The GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Task Force of the W3C Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG) has published three new working drafts on Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization:
Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Handling Bidirectional Text 1.0 "provides advice for the use of markup and CSS to create pages for languages that use bidirectional text, such as Arabic and Hebrew. It attempts to counter many of the misunderstandings or over-complexities that currently abound. It also offers advice to those preparing content that will be localized into scripts that behave like Arabic and Hebrew."
Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Characters and Encodings 1.0 " provides practical techniques related to character sets, encodings, and other character-specific matters that HTML content authors can use to ensure that their HTML is easily adaptable for an international audience. These are techniques that are best addressed from the start of content development if unnecessary costs and resource issues are to be avoided later on."
Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying the language of content 1.0 accorditng to whose abstract, "Specifying the language of content is useful for a wide number of applications, from linguistically sensitive searching to applying language-specific display properties. In some cases the full application is still awaiting full development, whereas in others, such as detection of language by voice browsers, it is a necessity today. Marking up language meta information is something that can and should be done today. Without it, none of these applications can be taken advantage of." Reading this document, I notice that I've been nelgient in decalring the languages of my pages. I'll start fixing that now.