The W3C Internationalization Activity creates materials for content authors and developers that provides advice on how to create Web pages and applications that are internationalized.
For guidelines related to spec developers and browser implementers, see Developer Support.
Getting started
Getting Started with Internationalization links to a graded set of introductory materials for newcomers to Web internationalization.
How to guides
- Authoring techniques
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If you work with HTML and CSS, Authoring HTML & CSS is a good starting point. It helps you drill down to find information, organized by task. For each task, you'll find a set of recommendations with links to more details. You'll also find links to useful resources, such as articles, specs, tests, etc.
There's a similar page called W3C I18N Techniques: Authoring SVG, albeit less well developed, so far.
- Article list
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The Article list provides a short-cut to the articles and tutorials the W3C i18n Working Group produces.
Many of the articles are translated. If your browser preferences are appropriate set, you may be automatically taken to a translation (though you can switch languages easily). Alternatively, set the language by clicking at the top right of the list page, and the items in the list with a translation will be shown.
See also the article development pipeline.
- Also ...
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The page Ready-made Counter Styles provides code snippets for user-defined counter styles used by various cultures around the world. As support for custom-designed styles grows, it can be used as a reference for those wishing to create their own user-defined counter styles for CSS style sheets.
Tests
The Internationalization Activity has tests for internationalization features that not only look at whether specs are supported in user agents, but also explore how browsers and other user agents handle regional requirements for language support.
There are two main sets of tests. The I18n test suite conforms to the Web Platform Tests approach, and most of those tests are ported to the WPT repository. There is also a set of interactive tests that can be used in an interactive way to rapidly set up and share tests that explore user-agent support for language-related and spec features.
We report results for the major browser engines for all of these tests.
Tools
The following was created at the W3C:
I18n checker Run your pages through this checker to see if there are any issues. It checks for various things that matter for international audiences, in both the HTTP header and the page itself.
These pages were not created at the W3C, but may be useful for working with internationalized content:
Language subtag lookup Find or check language tags and subtags. Uses the latest BCP47 data.
UniView Find characters, analyse text, view Unicode character blocks, etc.
Links to more tools can be found at this page.
Following the work
You can receive announcements about the Internationalization Activity's work via the @webi18n Mastodon channel, @webi18n Twitter channel, or the news feed on the i18n home page. There are a number of RSS feeds for the latter.