Web Internationalization
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) publishes open (non-proprietary) standards for Web languages and protocols to achieve Web interoperability. W3C is developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web. Since 1994, W3C has published more than ninety such standards, called W3C Recommendations. The W3C Internationalization Activity (I18N) has the goal of proposing and coordinating techniques, conventions, guidelines and activities within the W3C and together with other organizations that allow and make it easy to use W3C technology worldwide, with different languages, scripts, and cultures. Realizing the need for taking up the internationalization issues for our twenty two constitutionally recognized languages, DIT, MCIT, CDAC & MAIT have become members of W3C and have made a humble beginning for undertaking this mammoth task.
Focus of W3C Internationalization activity will be to formulate specifications that include Indic languages in all Internet technologies, Reference implementation of these specifications and Maximize adoption of W3C standards to ensure the benefits to all stakeholders. Some of the activities on wish list are defining Language Tags as identifiers to be used in protocols or document formats to indicate the natural language of the content, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) & Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI), to implement Multilingual Domain Names and in identifying resources for protocols, formats, and software components, Locale specific data to equip software developers for building localeaware functionality in their operating environment, Cascading Style Sheets to specify the appearance of text and other elements and so on....................
DIT also catalysed the setting up of W3C office in India. An effort has been made to bring out a special issue of Vishwabharat@tdil on W3C to bring the Indian IT community to a platform for collaboratively working on these issues and actively participate in this activity at national and international level. With open invitation to jump on this bandwagon, I wish this venture a grand success.
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