Sunday, February 12, 2006

Richard Ishida on i18n in Australia

Richard Ishida, chair of Internationalisation at W3C was in Australia for a week long talks about i18n and how web developers, content manager and designers need to think about i18n from at an earlier stage of the project.

i18n (short for internationalisation as there are 18 letters between the first and the last letter), is an area where companies need to look into providing a feature if they would like to offer their service.

For example, one of the global projects that i'm working on (details out soon), doesn't have i18n as a business case, but will be accessed by people all over the world. This is where if we as developers, technical architects, designers think about i18n from an early stage of the project, future devs on the project won't need to restructure most of code to include other languages in. As Richard says, it doesn't have to be a big detour from the normal coding to include i18n, but just doing things differently.

Russ, Lisa, Amit and I went down to the W3C/WSG-Canberra meeting (on Feb 10) and it was a great trip, a good talk, (alright food, what else do you expect from maccas and hungry jacks).

While we were there, we caught up with the Port80-Canberra as well. It was good to meet Damo and Nathanael Boehm.

You can find my WSG-Canberra pics on flickr. All WSG pics from Russ, Lisa, Amit (and obviously mine) are also available. These include the WSG meeting in Melbourne on Feb 9.

edit: Fixed link to Amit's blog (it went to mine doh!)