[5810] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
WWW and non-English -> i18n
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Mon Sep 26 23:23:03 1994
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 04:20:56 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
From: "Richard L. Goerwitz" <goer@midway.uchicago.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
>> What ideas have been floated along the lines of making the Web more all-
>> encompassing, linguistically speaking?
>
>A very important matter here is the choice of language:
>
> (1) in the client
> (2) in the documents
>
>For (1) we must urge the client developers to make their
>program internationalized - preferably through the standardized
>"i18n" methods. Some work is being done for at least Mosaic (in
>Germany and in Sweden), but apparently not in cooperation with
>the developing team, with all the disadvantages that entails.
As I understand i18n, it is not suitable for anything we should
be envisioning for WWW. It is not a multilingual standard,
but a method for helping software developers localize their sys-
tems. The distinction here is critical. Localization is the
process of gearing a package for one specific locale. This is
not a method for generalizing display methods for multilingual
use.
However, let me add that Motif supposedly has code for bidirec-
tional text widgets. That is, it can theoretically handle text that
includes right-left and left-right wordwrapping text. So, for
example, you could write a bilingual Arabic-English or Hebrew-
English dictionary, and expect to find facilities there for
quoting both languages in the same document (same entry, in
fact).
I should emphasize, though, that I am not a Motif programmer,
and I am told that the code described above was ifdef'd out
in the current distribution because it wasn't considered fully
debugged. The next release may have it enabled. I also know
nothing about mixed up-down and right-left or left-right lang-
uages.
Richard
