a couple more non-tsunami i18n bits of information.

that i18n guy about town, tex texin, has put together a good document concerning the use of RFC 3066 language identifiers. you might lend a hand by perusing the table for any funny business (maybe like sinhalese in thailand--but hey, what do i know).

and just when i thought i knew everything about encoding (maybe because i actually think all you really have to know is Just Use Unicode), i find out something new. while doing some research in the java i18n forums i stumbled onto a really nifty java encoding resource, part of a java and internet glossary. i especially liked the term armouring (which i had never heard used in this context before): Converting binary data into printable gibberish so that data transport systems will not corrupt it. so that's what it's called.

if you want to know how the W3C defines g11n, i18n, and l10n have a look at this. it was prepared by susan k. miller over at Boeing.

but you already know all that....

the W3C folks have released another i18n tutorial, this one deals with providing language information. it aims to cover these objectives:

• guidelines for declaring the language of documents and text
• how to specify language attribute values
• applicability of the language tag to apply language-specific CSS styling
• a brief introduction to the concept of server-based language negotiation

well worth the read.

the W3C has just issued a new i18n faq related to language negotiation. it discusses the just about absolute need for language negotiation on good i18n web sites, examining the old standby of HTTP Accept-Language header (i use that in combination with geolocator CFC) as well as stressing the need for manual language swapping (couldn't agree more). another important but sometimes overlooked point is "navigation stickiness", basically remembering which language a user has selected (in cf via cookies or session vars) & always serving content in that language. another interesting point (to me anyway) was a trick to also look at User-Agent header which sometimes also contains language (besides all that boring browser version, etc. stuff). cool. i'm going to look at adding that to the geoLocator CFC when Accept-Language is empty.

so now you know.

stars and garters, the w3c has added an RSS feed for their FAQs, you can find it here. the latest FAQ deals with setting encoding in web authoring applications including many macromedia products (the cf stuff is kind of soggy and hard to light but at least its mentioned, i'll see if it can't be stiffened up a bit).

w3c has released a draft ("very draft" might better describe it) doc entitled "Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization 1.0". the article quite rightly emphasizes i18n from the git go rather than as an after thought and covers a lot of practical stuff. one statement i stood and cheered for was "Choose UTF-8 or another Unicode encoding for all content". i just wish more cf folks would understand that, it would make their lives a lot simpler. the doc, while only about half done, is also chock full of useful resources. makes good reading in any case.

you can find it here.