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Added Tobie to credits. More structural augmentation. Changed intro o…
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…rder. Added more examples to flesh out display issues.
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aphillips committed Jul 29, 2017
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<section id="Introduction">
<h2>Introduction</h2>

<p>Natural language information on the Web depends on and benefits from
the presence of language and direction metadata. Along with support for
Unicode, mechanisms for including and specifying the base direction and
language of spans of text are one of the key considerations in
development of new formats and technologies for the Web.</p>

<p>Markup formats, such as HTML and XML, as well as related styling
languages, such as CSS and XSL, are reasonably mature and provide support for
the interchange and presentation of the world's languages via built-in
features.</p>

<p>This document was developed as a result of observations by the
Internationalization Working Group over a series of specification
reviews related to formats based on JSON, WebIDL, and other
non-markup data languages. Unlike markup formats, such as XML, these
data languages generally do not provide extensible attributes and were
not conceived with built-in language or direction metadata.</p>

<p>Natural language information on the Web depends on and benefits from
the presence of language and direction metadata. Along with support for
Unicode, mechanisms for including and specifying the base direction and
the natural language of spans of text are one of the key
internationalization considerations when developing new formats and
technologies for the Web.</p>

<p>Markup formats, such as HTML and XML, as well as related styling
languages, such as CSS and XSL, are reasonably mature and provide
support for the interchange and presentation of the world's languages
via built-in features. Data formats need similar support in order to
ensure a complete and consistent support for the world's languages and
cultures.</p>



<section id="Why is this important?">
<h3>Why is this important?</h3>

<p>Information about language of content is important when processing and presenting
natural language data for a variety of reasons. When this data is not
present, the resulting degradation in appearance or functionality can
frustrate users, render the content unintelligible, or disable important features. Some of the
affected processes include:</p>
<p>Information about the language of content is important when processing
and presenting natural language data for a variety of reasons. When
language information is not present, the resulting degradation in appearance or
functionality can frustrate users, render the content unintelligible,
or disable important features. Some of the affected processes
include:</p>

<ul>
<li>Selection of fonts and rendering to prevent "ransom noting", and especially the selection of the correct
<li>Selection of fonts and configuration of rendering options to
enable the proper display of different languages. This includes
prevention of problems such as: <ul>
<li>"ransom noting" (showing text using multiple different fonts)</li>
<li>language specific glyph selection,especially the selection of the correct
Chinese/Japanese/Korean font due to important presentational
variations for the same characters in these languages.</li>
<li>Spell checking and other content checking (such as abuse
detection) </li>
variations for the same characters in these languages
<li>displaying blanks, spaces, question marks, or other
disappearnace of characters due to the lack of glyphs in the
selected font</li>
</ul></li>
<li>Spell checking and other content processing (such as abuse
detection, hyphenation, etc.) </li>
<li>Indexing, search, and other natural language
text operations </li>
<li>Filtering according to intended audience
Expand All @@ -166,8 +180,8 @@ <h3>Why is this important?</h3>
<p>Similarly, direction metadata is important to the Web. When a string
contains text in a script that runs right-to-left (RTL), it must be
possible to eventually display that string correctly when it reaches an
end user. For that to happen, it is necessary to establish what 'base
direction' needs to be applied to the string as a whole. The
end user. For that to happen, it is necessary to establish what <dfn>base
direction</dfn> needs to be applied to the string as a whole. The

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@r12a

r12a Aug 2, 2017

Contributor

This doesn't provide a definition of base direction, so i'm not sure why the dfn tag is used here.
appropriate base direction cannot always be deduced by simply looking
at the string; even if it were possible, the producer and consumer of
the string would need to use the same heuristics to interpret its
Expand All @@ -186,6 +200,9 @@ <h3>Why is this important?</h3>
can be that, while the data arrives intact, its processing or
presentation cannot be wholly recovered.</p>

<section id="baseExample">
<h3>An Example</h3>

<p>Suppose that you are building a Web page to show a
customer's library of e-books. The e-books exist in a catalog of data
and consist of the usual data values. A JSON file for a single entry
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -237,6 +254,7 @@ <h3>Why is this important?</h3>
field length, that are affected by the insertion of additional
controls or markup.</p>

</section>
</section>

<section id="unicode-enough">
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -403,27 +421,20 @@ <h4 id="text_processing">Capturing the text-processing language</h4>
Tibetan later in the commentary for some annotations, so that
appropriate fonts and wrapping algorithms can be applied there.

<footer> </footer>
</p>
</section>
</section>



<section id="mainpoint2">
<h2>The main issue</h2>
<p>The main issue is how a consumer of a
<section id="languageApproaches">
<h2>Approaches to Tagging Language</h2>

<p>The main issue is how a consumer of a
string will know which language-related features should be used for
that string when it is eventually processed or displayed to the
user. A number of alternatives are considered below.</p>
user. A number of alternatives are considered below.</p>

</section>


<section id="languageApproaches">
<h2>Approaches to Tagging Language</h2>

<section id="langapproach1">
<h2>Require HTML or XML for content</h2>

Expand All @@ -437,15 +448,17 @@ <h2>Require HTML or XML for content</h2>


<section id="langapproach2">
<h2>Approach two</h2>
<h2>Create a new datatype in JSON-LD</h2>
<p>JSON-LD</p>
</section>



<section id="langapproach3">
<h2>Approach three</h2>
<p>Dictionary</p>
<h2>Provide a "dictionary"</h2>
<p>Provide a "dictionary" or canned pre-built extension that can be
used commonly across a number of different document formats using
the same base data format, such as JSON.</p>
</section>
<section id="unicodeTags">
<h2>Unicode tag characters</h2>
Expand All @@ -456,7 +469,7 @@ <h2>Unicode tag characters</h2>
and are often suggested as an alternate means of providing in-band
non-markup language tagging.</p>

<p>Here is how Unicode tags work:</p>
<p>Here is how Unicode tags are supposed to work:</p>

<p>A language tag is just one of the potential tags that could be
applied using this system, so each language tag begins with a tag
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -703,6 +716,7 @@ <h2>Acknowledgements</h2>
<p>The Internationalization (I18N) Working Group would like to thank
the following contributors to this document:
Mati Allouche,
Tobie Langel,
Felix Sasaki,
Najib Tounsi,

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