The World Wide Web Consortium has issued a Call for Participation in a W3C Internationalization Workshop, to be held February 1, 2002 in Washington DC in conjunction with the 20th International Unicode Conference. W3C has decided to strengthen its internationalization work, and will prepare relevant I18N guidelines for XML formats, document creators, webmasters, tools developers, etc. The goal of this workshop is to reevaluate the I18N Activity and to prepare the rechartering of the I18N Activity and Working Groups/Interest Groups by surveying the problems and showcasing existing solutions, raising awareness of the issues, and providing a forum for discussion. The workshop is an open event, but space limitations dictate a limit of forty-five (45) participants; position papers should be submitted for review by January 10, 2002. This open-event workshop is part of the W3C's Internationalization Activity, and supports W3C's commitment "to make the Web accessible to people around the world by promoting technologies that take into account the vast differences of language, script, and culture of users on all continents."

From the W3C Internationalization Activity Statement: "Work on internationalization is part of W3C's Document Formats Domain and is done in collaboration with many other groups working within W3C. The goal is to ensure that W3C's formats and protocols are usable worldwide in all languages and in all writing systems. A number of internationalization features have been successfully incorporated into W3C Recommendations, including those for (X)HTML, CSS, XML, RDF, SMIL, DOM, MathML, SVG, XPath, XSL(T), and XML Schema. The HTTP/1.1 protocol also includes features associated with Web content in different languages and different character encodings..."

From the Call for Participation. "Suggested workshop topics include:

• Ideas and proposals for W3C Guidelines:
  • Guidelines for XML formats
  • Guidelines for document creators, webmasters, tools developers
  • Guidelines for monolingual documents, multilingual web sites, multilingual documents, parallel documents, documents intended for translation
  • The Character Model as guidelines for specifications
• Ideas and proposals for W3C Outreach work on internationalization
• Experience reports on guideline and outreach work outside internationalization (e.g., Web Accessibility)
• Organizational aspects (new WG, new IG, etc.)
• Other proposals for contributions to the I18N Activity