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.

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.

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: