XML News from Tuesday, April 24, 2007

The W3C Internationalization GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group has posted the finished version of Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content. According to the note, "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 potential applications for language information are still waiting for implementations to catch up, whereas in others, such as detection of language by voice browsers, it is a necessity today. On the other hand, adding markup for language information to content is something that can and should be done today. Without it, it will not be possible to take advantage of any future developments." This advice is summarized in 16 "best practices:

• Best Practice 1: Always declare the default language for text in the page using attributes on the html tag, unless the document contains content aimed at speakers of more than one language.
• Best Practice 2: Where a document contains content aimed at speakers of more than one language, decide whether you want to declare one language in the html tag, or leave the languages undefined until later.
• Best Practice 3: Where a document contains content aimed at speakers of more than one language, try to divide the document linguistically at the highest possible level, and declare the appropriate language for each of those divisions.
• Best Practice 4: Use the lang and/or xml:lang attributes around text to indicate any changes in language.
• Best Practice 5: For HTML use the lang attribute only, for XHTML 1.0 served as text/html use the lang and xml:lang attributes, and for XHTML served as XML use the xml:lang attribute only.
• Best Practice 6: Use language attributes rather than HTTP or meta elements to declare the default language for text processing.
• Best Practice 7: Do not declare the default language of a document in the body element, use the html element.
• Best Practice 8: If the text in attribute values and element content is in different languages, consider using a nested approach.
• Best Practice 9: Consider using a Content-Language declaration in the HTTP header or a meta tag to declare metadata about the language(s) of the intended audience of a document.
• Best Practice 10: Where a document contains content aimed at speakers of more than one language, use Content-Language with a comma-separated list of language tags.
• Best Practice 11: Follow the guidelines in the IETF's BCP 47 for language attribute values.
• Best Practice 12: Use the shortest possible language tag values.
• Best Practice 13: Where possible, use the codes zh-Hans and zh-Hant to refer to Simplified and Traditional Chinese, respectively.
• Best Practice 14: When pointing to a resource in another language, consider the pros and cons of indicating the language of the target document.
• Best Practice 15: If you want to indicate that the target document of an a element is in another language, consider the pros and cons of using hreflang with CSS.
• Best Practice 16: Do not use flag icons to indicate languages.

The W3C GRDDL Working Group has posted the second public working draft of GRDDL Use Cases: Scenarios of extracting RDF data from XML. Use cases include:

• Scheduling : Jane is trying to coordinate a meeting.
• Health Care: Kayode wants to query clinical data.
• Web Aggregation: Stephan wants a synthetic review before buying a guitar.
• Querying sites and digital libraries: DC4Plus Corp. wants to automate the publication of its electronic documents.
• Wikis and e-learning: The Technical University of Marcilly decided to use wikis to foster knowledge exchanges between lecturers and students.
• Web syndication : extracting form descriptions to push entries to Voltaire's blog.
• Validated Documents: the OAI would like to be able to specify document licenses in the schema they share.
• Pulling data from the Web: Steffen wants to build a directory of the people he works with.
• Pushing a transformation: Oceanic Consortium wants to provide transformations for their files without altering them or their schema.

The W3C Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has posted a new working draft of Implementation Techniques for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. "This document provides non-normative information to authoring tool developers who wish to satisfy the checkpoints of 'Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 2.0' [ATAG20]. It includes suggested techniques, sample strategies in deployed tools, and references to other accessibility resources (such as platform-specific software accessibility guidelines) that provide additional information on how a tool may satisfy each ATAG 2.0 checkpoint."