The W3C Internationalization Checkeris a free service for web authors and developers that checks web pages and provides:

• a table listing key international settings for a page, such as character encoding, language declarations, and text direction.
• a list of errors, warnings and helpful suggestions about the page, with pointers to resources where you can learn more.

Version 2 of the checker moves away from checking against particular specifications to checking how a page will work in a browser. For the most part, it assumes that pages will be parsed using an HTML5 compliant parser. Pages served as application/xhtml+xmlhave some significant differences with regards to character encoding and language declarations, however, and these are taken into account if the checker detects that the page being checked is served as XML.

See the change logfor detailed information about changes. In summary, 18 new checks were added, and the messages for 11 checks were significantly updated.

In addition, the following new rows were added to the information table:

• All language tags: lists all language tags used in the page. If you click on any of the language tags listed, you are taken to the Language Subtag Lookup tool, which provides information about validity of the subtags used, lists their meaning, and provides additional usage tips.
• Unicode control codes: lists directional controls used in the document, with a frequency count for each. The list is divided to reflect actual characters vs. numeric character references vs. named character references.
• Notable attributes: lists attributes used that are typically associated with features needed by an international audience.
• Notable elements: the same, but for elements.

Please let us know about bugs and missing features using the feedback form.

The W3C  HTML5 Validator has been enhanced with functionality that detects the overall language of a page. The validator can currently detect a little over 50 languages, but more will be added over time.

This makes it possible to compare the language of the content in a page with language declarations, and issue warnings if the langattribute does not match the language of content, if no langattribute is given at all, or if a language using a right-to-left script is detected but a dirattribute is missing from the htmltag.

For more information on the langattribute, see the Why use the language attribute? article, or Declaring the overall language of a pagein the technique index.

A draft of a new article, Time & date, Essential concepts is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by 22 June.

This article introduces a number of basic concepts needed to understand other articles that deal with time zones and handling of dates and times on the Web.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on the link “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

Note that some links don’t work because this is in a test location. No need to report those.

For twenty-five years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. The 40th conference will be held this year on November 1-3, 2016 in Santa Clara, California.

The deadline for speaker submissions is Monday, 4 April, so don’t forget to send in an abstract if you want to speak at the conference.

The Program Committee will notify authors by Friday, May 13, 2016. Final presentation materials will be required from selected presenters by Friday, July 22, 2016.

Tutorial Presenters receive complimentary conference registration, and two nights lodging, while Session Presenters receive a fifty percent conference discount and two nights lodging.

This tutorial workshop, sponsored by the Unicode Consortium and organized by the German University of Technology in Muscat, Oman, is a three-day event designed to familiarize the audience with the Unicode Standard and the concepts of internationalization. It is the first Unicode event to be held in the Middle East.

The workshop programincludes an introduction to Writing Systems & Unicode, plus presentations on Arabic Typography, web best practices, mobile internationalization, and more.

The workshop websiteprovides full information about the event. Early bird registration lasts until January 31, 2016, but register early to ensure a place.

This video  explains what Linguistic Linked Data is and summarizes the outcomes of the  LIDER project . This includes best practices for working with Linguist Linked Data, a reference architecture and a roadmap for future activities around Linguistic Linked Data. The video has been produced by the LIDER project and has been published during the  European Data Forum 2015 event.

The Internationalization Working Group has published a First Public Working Draft of Internationalization Best Practices for Spec Developers.

This document provides a checklist of internationalization-related considerations when developing a specification. Most checklist items point to detailed supporting information in other documents. Where such information does not yet exist, it can be given a temporary home in this document. The dynamic page Internationalization Techniques: Developing specificationsis automatically generated from this document.

The current version is still a very early draft, and it is expected that the information will change regularly as new content is added and existing content is modified in the light of experience and discussion.

The EncodingCandidate Recommendation has been updated to take into account changes made to the editor’s draft since its initial publication as a Candidate Recommendation. These changes are largely due to issues discovered during implementation. This is a snapshot of the WHATWG document, as of 29 September 2015 and no changes have been made from the original in the body of the document other than to align with W3C house styles.

If you wish to make comments regarding this document, please raise them as github issues against the latest editor’s draft. Only send comments by email to [email protected] if you are unable to raise issues on github. All comments are welcome.

The utf-8 encoding is the most appropriate encoding for interchange of Unicode, the universal coded character set. Therefore for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed in new contexts, this specification requires (and defines) the utf-8 encoding.

The other (legacy) encodings have been defined to some extent in the past. However, user agents have not always implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of encodings. This specification addresses those gaps so that new user agents do not have to reverse engineer encoding implementations and existing user agents can converge.