Internationalization and Multilingualism in Web Standards

Larry Masinter

Palo Alto Research Center

November 1996

Purpose of talk

• Overview of Web Standards
• Set context for Authoring, Management, Deployment domains
• Current status of infrastructure
• Open issues in I18N

First: What is the Web?

• One network, everyone on it
• Mixed modes of communication
• Multiple media

One Network, Everyone on it

Mixed modes of communication

• Publish, retrieve
• Send, recieve
• Broadcast, filter
• Interact in real time

For multiple media

• Text
• Graphics
• Video
• Audio

Who makes Web Standards?

• Standards organizations
• Consortia
• Companies
• Individuals

Kinds of web standards

• Content
  • what are the objects we're moving around?
• Protocols
  • how do they get moved?
• Naming
  • how to reference something not in hand?

Standards for Web Content

• MIME
• HTML as a MIME type
• Internationalization issues

MIME:
MultiPurpose Internet Mail Exchange

• Originally designed for mail
• Allows
  • Multiple media
  • Multiple character sets
  • Multiple languages

Internet Media Types ("MIME types")

• Standard way of naming data formats
• Hierarchical structure with parameters
• Applications use MIME to decide how to interpret data (instead of file extension)
• text, image, audio, video, multipart, application

MIME Major Types

• text: sequences of characters
• image: bitmaps in various forms, e.g., gif, jpeg, tiff, png
• audio: sounds in various forms
• video: animations
• message, multipart: special purpose
• application: catch-all

MIME subtype

• Standard registry: "image/tiff", "application/postscript"
• New registry rules recently approved
• "application/vnd.ms-word"

MIME Text: Characters

• may have "charset" parameter
• charset determines both Character Encoding Scheme and Repertoire
• text/html issues in Domain 3 (Authoring)

Charset issues

• Cannot standardize on "Unicode"
• Local applications will want national encodings
• Han Unification, other political difficulties

Primary issue

• Standardize when possible (ISO 10646)
• Label when you can't (use MIME charset registration)
• Don't make recipients guess

MIME Content-Language

• Uses standard codes for identifying (primary) language of content
• Completely optional

Standards for network protocols

• Electronic Mail (SMTP)
• Web Browsing (HTTP)
• Broadcast communication (NNTP)
• and more..
  • directory access (LDAP)
  • interactive sessions (TELNET)
  • ….

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

• Started as a simple protocol, designed for the 1990 vision of the World Wide Web
• http://widget.com/product.html
  • Open connection to widget.com
  • send "GET /product.html"
  • read headers
  • read body
  • close connection

HTTP Improvements

• Performance
• Reliability
• Caching
• Persistent connections
• Content negotiation

Simple content negotiation in HTTP

Transparent negotiation in HTTP

Dimensions of negotiation

• Language (Accept-Language)
• Character set (Accept-Charset)
• Capabilities to handle media (Accept)
• Brand of software (User-Agent)

Issues for HTTP Internationalization and Multilingualism

• deployment
• overhead of negotiation
• interaction with authoring, caching

Identifiers in the Web

• URL: locations
  • New York Public Library, second floor, third aisle, second shelf, third book from left
• URN: location-independent names
  • QP:475.L95; ISBN:0-19-854529-0
• URC: descriptions
  • genre: book, title: The Ecology of Vision;
    author: J.N.Lythgoe; Date: 1979;
    Publisher: Clarendon Press, Oxford

URL Requirements

• An object that describes the location of a resource
• Global scope
• parsable
• transportable in many contexts
• extensible
• not loaded with other information

URN Requirements

• global scope
• persistent
• scalable

URC: Uniform Resource Characteristics

• Syntax for carrying metadata
  • Title
• A standard set of tags useful for describing Internet resources

Some unsolved problems

• Internationalization (M. Dürst)
• things go away
• pimples.com
• Apple Computer and Apple Music
  • conflicts over short names
• urn:hdl:MTV/I_quit
  • how does authority migrate?

Other protocols in the Web

• Access control and ratings
  • Rating of entertainment content for adult themes
  • How to deal with cultural differences
  • Multiple rating services

Summary: Internationalization and Multilingualism in Web Standards

• Content: good progress
• Protocols: are they enough?
• Naming: is there a solution?
• Standards lead deployment