Internationalization

(AKA internationalisation, i18n.)

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

Background

• To encourage broader/better support of international content, modern internet and web standards strongly advocate the support of character sets such as UTF-8.
• The vocabularies used in such standards in general use US English terms and spelling (ref: W3C, IETF) for elements, attributes, properties and values. For example (X)HTML is defined in US English (e.g "color", "center"). See en-us-faq for more on why this is actually good for internationalization.

The design of microformats follows both of these well-established practices of modern internet and web standards design.

Issues

• ...

Resolved Issues

• 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. Is <abbr class="type" title="fax">Téléc</abbr> acceptable?
    • That code will work in hCard, however, there is now a better solution described in the value-class-pattern.
• Gender values in Genealogy
  • This issue should be moved to gender-brainstorming (or perhaps gender-issues) until it actually presents a real issue in at least a draft microformat.
  • This has subsequently been resolved with a new gender property in vCard4/hCard1.1 (hCard2 as well)

Solutions

• Use the HTML lang and diretion (dir) attributes wisely.
• For telephone numbers in hCard, use abbr and the ITU E.123 standard international format, for example:

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

• Use the value-class-pattern for the type subproperty of the tel property when authoring in a language other than US English (which is used by the enumerated values of the type subproperty).

See also

• en-us
• en-us-faq
• naming-principles
• minimal-vocabulary
• value-class-pattern
• FAQ: How do microformats breach language barriers?
• hCards using UTF8
• accessibility
• content-translation

Microformats wiki in other languages

See:

• microformats wiki in other languages
• how to start a new translation

Internationalization and localization references

• W3C Internationalization and Localization
• Wikipedia's definition of internationlization and localization
• The Localization Industry Standards Association - Some information requires site registration (like the primer), but not paid membership. Specific marketing details require paid membership.
• Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article: International Web Usability - which aligns with the microformats principle for humans first, machines second.