Category: For review

An updated version of Working with Time and Time Zones is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday, 23 January 2025.

Working with time values can be the source of confusion for developers and users because of the complexity inherent in calendars. Local changes, such as daylights savings (summer) time can interfere with the orderly progression or comparison of values and users in different locations can see the wrong date or time displayed, especially if the developer doesn’t understand how to manage the information appropriately. This document contains guidelines and best practices for working with time values in applications and document formats on the Web, as well as an explanation of the core concepts.

To comment, please file issues on our github repo.

The article How to make list markers stand upright in vertical text. is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Friday 29 April.

In Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian vertically-set text it is normal for list counters to sit upright above the start of the list. Until recently this was problematic, because browsers would only show the numbers lying on their side. This article describes how to make them stand upright, and the currently remaining issues to make this look perfect.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The Internationalization Activity has recently published the following FPWD documents.

• Khmer Layout Requirements
• Thai Layout Requirements
• Lao Layout Requirements

Thus far, these documents mostly point to external descriptions of how the script works. They also point to relevant GitHub discussions, tests, and gap reports. This provides a convenient way to access information about a particular script/language when doing gap analysis as part of our language enablement program.

Similar structural changes have been applied to the following documents, although these documents contain much more in-page content.

• Requirements for Tibetan Text Layout and Typography
• Arabic & Persian Layout Requirements

Comments welcome, via the GH links indicated at the top of each page.

This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of Korean language on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, in particular HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders. This is a preliminary analysis.

The first public working draft is published to encourage users and experts to review the information it currently contains, and provide any additional information that may be relevant to supporting users of the Korean language on the Web.

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.

N’Ko Layout Requirements is out for wide review in preparation for publishing as a First Public Working Draft. We are looking for comments by Wednesday 3 May.

The N’Ko script is used for a West African koiné register of Manding (called Kángbɛ).

The document describes requirements for the layout and presentation of text in Web standards and technologies such as HTML, CSS, & Digital Publications. It supports the N’Ko Gap Analysis.

Please send any comments as github issues.

The article Working with source code markup and code examples for RTL scripts is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Wednesday 26 April.

Editing markup for pages in Arabic, Hebrew, and many other languages poses challenges unless a specialized editor is available. For similar reasons, it is also difficult to include examples of bidirectional code in explainers. This page looks at some of the problems content developers and implementers of editors are likely to be faced with, and offers some advice, where possible.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article Font styles & font fallback is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 3 November.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article Ruby Styling is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 14 July.

The article reviews the typical usage patterns of inline annotations for Japanese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese, and provides guidance for content authors about how to use features of the CSS Ruby spec to achieve the rendering they want. It also reports on current support for those features in the 3 major browser engines. This information should also be useful for authors writing in the Traditional Mongolian orthography.

This is a companion article to Ruby Markup, which focuses on how to mark up inline annotations.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article RTL rendering of LTR scripts is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 7 July.

The article suggests ways to produce runs of right-to-left text using HTML & CSS for languages that are nowadays normally written left-to-right. The use cases for this are rare, and mostly relate to academic descriptions of text in orthographies such as Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tifinagh, Old Norse runes, and a good number of other now-archaic scripts.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 2 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Perso-arabic Kashmiri Gap Analysis
• Uighur Gap Analysis

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.