Working for International Web Standards
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Henny Swan on the Web Standards Project (WaSP) posted a thought provoking article on Web Standards in China. It’s easy to get caught up in the mental box that everyone in the world is of Anglo origin, speaks perfect English and shares a historic socio-political heritage. The challenges for internationalisation and accessibility require us to leave that box. The truth is that most of the world is not us, if you’re another Anglo. US in the big sense has become a global audience with hundreds of languages and dialects, with the added complexity of conflicting cultures.
If we really want to get passionate about web standards and producing quality products in the web environment the conversation has to be initiated about internationalisation and ways we might overcome these global audience limitations.
In Henny’s post she points out some huge barriers to the adoption of web standards in China including 95 per cent usage of Internet Explorer 6, most ecommerce sites rely on Active X, and the Chinese have a lack of high quality translated resources for web standards developers to reference. All valid. Another large part of that issue is the cultural and semantic differences between the language and people, which means not only literal translations of websites and resources but also some low level repurposing. And, when you really think of it, these are also subject to political oversight - consider John Oxton’s Joshuaink a few years ago. Web standards resources may not all be smiles and culturally polite cafe conversation.
An interesting facet of how we can deal with Chinese web standards is through the expatriate Chinese communities. In Australia, for example, Chinese is the second most spoken language (in general terms). Do these communities develop websites? Are we already working with them? Do they blog in English, Chinese or both? As a catalyst this would be my considered focus for promoting web standards development in China.
