http://blogs.openroad.net.au Exploring diversity on the Web Mon, 19 May 2008 03:18:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A Burmese localisation project for OpenOffice has been established and is under way. The Burmese OpenOffice is based on the Unicode 5.1 Myanmar block. The localisation team are looking for beta testers. A translation project has been set up to translate OpenOffice interface into Burmese. The Burmese translation project are looking ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2008/05/19/burmese-openoffice/ In the first and second parts I gave an example of using stylish to control font display for minority languages within Gmail and Yahoo. In this post I will quickly look at Hotmail. http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/12/12/firefox-and-web-email-services-hotmail/ In the first part I gave an example of using stylish to control font display for minority languages within Gmail. In this post II'll quickly look at Yahoo's new email web interface. These CSS rules do not apply to the classic mail UI. http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/11/21/firefox-and-web-email-services-yahoo/ Current font technologies and font rendering systems make a distinction between writing scripts that require complex rendering and those scripts that do not. In most cases Latin is treated as a non-complex script. For a range of African and South East Asian languages that use the Latin script, the Latin ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/10/31/complex_latin/ The W3C website has an article on using CSS 2.1 selectors to apply language specific styling based on the language of an element. This is quite an effective tool for developing websites with multilingual content. The key drawback to using language specific styling is Internet Explorer's limited support for CSS 2.1 ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/10/23/language_styling/ In part 1 I indicated that I would discuss internationalization of Australian Government websites with respect to accessibility by referencing two particular federal government websites. In this article I'll be discussing the Centrelink and DIAC websites. http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/09/28/intersections-in-cyberspace-2-centrelink-and-diac-multilingual-content/ The Community Languages Online report has been published on the eGovernment Resource Centre. The report explores current practice and future directions of multilingual information on Victorian Government websites. It details findings and recommendations from research into how multilingual web-based government information can be created and used in the best way for ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/09/21/community-languages-online/ In the aftermath of the Community Languages Online report I've had time to start teasing out my thoughts on web internationalisation and accessibility as it applies to government information in community languages. Web accessibility is well entrenched in federal and state governments' web standards in Australia. Generally web developers understand the ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/07/14/intersections-in-cyberspace-internationalisation-accessibility-and-community-languages/ A number of changes to the Myanmar script and proposed support for additional South east Asian support are in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode pipelines over the next year or two. Andrew West provides a very good summary of what will be in Unicode 5.1 in his post What's new in ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/06/08/looking-forward-se-asian-scripts-support/ I've been looking into Unicode support for the Myanmar Script. A few local projects require Unicode support for Myanmar (Burmese), Mon and S'gaw Karen. The existing Unicode Myanmar block only supports Myanmar (Burmese). Unicode 5.1 will make changes to the existing Myanmar block and add additional characters for Mon and ... http://blogs.openroad.net.au/2007/06/03/the-myanmar-script-and-unicode/