internationalization

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Internationalization

(AKA internationalisation, i18n.)

What can we do, to make microformats more easily usable, by people who are not publishing in (US) English?

Internet and web standards in general use US English terms and spelling (ref: W3C, IETF) for elements, attributes, properties and values.
- e.g. (X)HTML is defined in US English (e.g "color", "center").
However such standards also strongly advocate the support of character sets such as UTF-8 for broader/better support of international content.

type attributes, such as those for tel in hCard, require either English-language content on the page, or English-language abbr titles.
- March 2007 discussion (ongoing) of abbr title for non-English values (http://microformats.org/discuss/mail/microformats-discuss/2007-March/009000.html). Is <abbr class="type" title="fax">Téléc</abbr> acceptable?
Gender values in Genealogy

Use the HTML lang and diretion (dir) attributes (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/dirlang.html) wisely.
For telephone numbers in hCard, use abbr and the ITU E.123 standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.123) international format, for example:

<abbr class="tel" title="+44 1233 456 7890">01233 456 7890</abbr>

See:

WC3 Internationalization and Localization (http://www.w3.org/International/) - Lots of information in all areas.
Wikipedia's definition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization) - As well as further links to related articles.
The Localization Industry Standards Association (http://www.lisa.org/) - Some information requires site registration (like the primer), but not paid membership. Specific marketing details require paid membership.
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article on localization (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9608.html) - To remind this is actually for people first.