internationalization

Internationalization

AKA internationalisation, i18n.

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

Background

• Internet and web standards in general use US English terms and spelling (ref: W3C, IETF) for elements, attributes, properties, 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.

Issues

• March 2007 discussion (ongoing) of abbr title for non-English values. Is <abbr class="type" title="fax">Téléc</abbr> acceptable?
• Gender values in Genealogy

Solutions

• For telephone numbers in hCard, use abbr and the standard international format, for example:

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

See also

• FAQ: How do microformats breach language barriers?
• hCards using UTF8
• accessibility