(AKA internationalisation, i18n.)
What can we do, to make microformats more easily usable, by people who are not publishing in (US) English?
- To encourage broader/better support of international content, modern internet and web standards strongly advocate the support of character sets such as UTF-8.
- The vocabularies used in such standards in general use US English terms and spelling (ref: W3C, IETF) for elements, attributes, properties and values. For example (X)HTML is defined in US English (e.g "color", "center"). See en-US FAQ for more on why this is actually good for internationalization.
The design of microformats follows both of these well-established practices of modern internet and web standards design.
typeattributes, such as those for
telin hCard, require either English-language content on the page, or English-language
- Gender values in Genealogy
- Use the HTML
langand diretion (
dir) attributes wisely.
- For telephone numbers in hCard, use abbr and the ITU E.123 standard international format, for example:
<abbr class="tel" title="+44 1233 456 7890">01233 456 7890</abbr>
- Use the Value Class Pattern for the
typesubproperty of the
telproperty when authoring in a language other than US English (which is used by the enumerated values of the
- en-US FAQ
- Naming Principles
- minimal vocabulary
- Value Class Pattern
- FAQ: How do microformats breach language barriers?
- hCards using UTF8
Microformats wiki in other languages
Internationalization and localization references
- W3C Internationalization and Localization
- Wikipedia's definition of internationlization and localization
- The Localization Industry Standards Association - Some information requires site registration (like the primer), but not paid membership. Specific marketing details require paid membership.
- Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article: International Web Usability - which aligns with the microformats principles for humans first, machines second.