Sunil Mohan Adapa’s Blog

I attended the Workshop on Internationalisation conducted by W3C-India office at Noida on 3rd and 4th of August 2006.

The workshop was organised by the W3C Indian office. CDAC and Department of Information and Communications Technology (MIT) are the major participants in the W3C Indian office. W3C works on setting up standards like HTML, XHTML, XML, DOM, CSS, MathML, SSML etc. W3C Indian office represents India in W3C, collects requirements specific to India in W3C standards and contributes to W3C standards in general.

The two foreign attendees to the workshop from W3C were from the W3C internationalisation workgroup. Their 6 sessions during the 2 days of the workshop focused on explaining the current status of internationalisation provisions in W3C standards and specific issues that are related to India that they were currently aware of. Their expectation of the workshop was to collect more issues related to Indian languages and specific rules for solving the issues recognised.

Unfortunately, most of the other presentations and discussions in the workshop were off-topic and repetitive. They included talks on introduction to localisation and internationalisation in general for
software applications (and not the web), machine translation, optical character recognition, corpus research, linguistic issues, speech recognition, speech synthesis research (but ignored SSML, which is more relevant in terms of standardisation!) and the internationalisation capabilities of IBM and Infosys.

Major contributions to the core issue of the workshops came from CDAC’s W3C-India language teams at Noida, Pune, Kolkata and Trivendrum. These teams have worked on issues with W3C standards, including the upcoming CSS3 standard. They have indicated issues with vertical text, justification of text, list style types, first letter drop-caps, etc., which is the kind of stuff that the workshop was meant to discuss.

However, the question of whether the standards have been comprehensively analysed has not been answered. The second day has seen discussion on international domain names and their implmentation in India (for .in TLD) by National Informatics Centre (NIC).

My Participation:

During the panel discussion, I pointed out the lack of effort to propagate W3C standards in the Indian web community. The major problem facing the growth of Indian language web today is the use of proprietary fonts and encodings to build websites. This is halting the progress of standards like Unicode. Further, Indian language websites are crippled and user cannot search the site or content in Google, participate by posting comments etc.

Yet, the W3C office whose major participants are CDAC and MIT have not taken steps to encourage the use of Unicode or other standards. Some government websites even use proprietary encodings. CDAC has not released its fonts under a proper license and thus killed any prospect of letting the publishers switch to Unicode using their fonts. Not just in the case of Unicode but government sites lack a commitment to even basic standards like HTML. For example, presidentofindia.nic.in is not following W3C standards. I have asked the attendents of the workshop to have deep commitment to follow standards and also encourage the use of these standards in the rest of India.

I also met a lot of people who are likely to help or work along to achieve common goals.