The Internationalization Activity of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has the mission of ensuring universal access to the Web, regardless of language, script or culture. In short, to help make the World Wide Web worldwide!
I joined the W3C in July 2002 to to help expand the work of the Internationalisation Activity, particularly in the area of guidelines, education and outreach. I am attached to ERCIM in the south of France (Sophia Antipolis), but based in the UK.
I’m currently the Internationalization Activity Lead, and staff contact for the Internationalization Core Working Group, and the ITS (Internationalized Tag Set) Interest Group. I’m also the coordinator of the European Commission funded MultilingualWeb project.
The Internationalization Working Group advises working groups and reviews specifications (such as HTML5, CSS3 modules, WOFF file format, Widgets, SVG, and the many other specifications) to ensure that those technologies can be used by people all around the world, regardless of the writing system, language or culture. We also support specification work at the IETF (such as Internationalized Domain Names and Resource Identifiers) and the Unicode Consortium.
We provide advice and other resources to content developers to help them apply the various features that support global use of the Web. With European Commission funding, we have been running a series of conferences bringing together stakeholders in standards and best practises for the Multilingual Web, and we are about to start a new working group, supported by the Commission, to work more closely with localization providers.
I’m also on the advisory committee and review board of the Internationalization & Unicode Conference.
I’m also on the Unicode editorial committee.