Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language
RFC 2070
| Document | Type |
RFC - Historic
(January 1997; No errata)
Obsoleted by RFC 2854
Was draft-ietf-html-i18n (html WG)
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Last updated | 2013-03-02 | ||
| Stream | IETF | ||
| Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized bibtex | ||
| Stream | WG state | WG Document | |
| Document shepherd | No shepherd assigned | ||
| IESG | IESG state | RFC 2070 (Historic) | |
| Consensus Boilerplate | Unknown | ||
| Telechat date | |||
| Responsible AD | (None) | ||
| Send notices to | (None) | ||
Network Working Group F. Yergeau
Request for Comments: 2070 Alis Technologies
Category: Standards Track G. Nicol
Electronic Book Technologies
G. Adams
Spyglass
M. Duerst
University of Zurich
January 1997
Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Abstract
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used to
create hypertext documents that are platform independent. Initially,
the application of HTML on the World Wide Web was seriously
restricted by its reliance on the ISO-8859-1 coded character set,
which is appropriate only for Western European languages. Despite
this restriction, HTML has been widely used with other languages,
using other coded character sets or character encodings, at the
expense of interoperability.
This document is meant to address the issue of the
internationalization (i18n, i followed by 18 letters followed by n)
of HTML by extending the specification of HTML and giving additional
recommendations for proper internationalization support. A foremost
consideration is to make sure that HTML remains a valid application
of SGML, while enabling its use with all languages of the world.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction .................................................. 2
1.1. Scope ...................................................... 2
1.2. Conformance ................................................ 3
2. The document character set ..................................... 4
2.1. Reference processing model ................................. 4
2.2. The document character set ................................. 6
2.3. Undisplayable characters ................................... 8
Yergeau, et. al. Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 2070 HTML Internationalization January 1997
3. The LANG attribute.............................................. 8
4. Additional entities, attributes and elements ................... 9
4.1. Full Latin-1 entity set .................................... 9
4.2. Markup for language-dependent presentation ................ 10
5. Forms ..........................................................16
5.1. DTD additions ..............................................16
5.2. Form submission ............................................17
6. External character encoding issues .............................18
7. HTML public text ...............................................20
7.1. HTML DTD ...................................................20
7.2. SGML declaration for HTML ..................................35
7.3. ISO Latin 1 character entity set ...........................37
8. Security Considerations.........................................40
Bibliography ......................................................40
Authors' Addresses ................................................43
1. Introduction
The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language used to
create hypertext documents that are platform independent. Initially,
the application of HTML on the World Wide Web was seriously
restricted by its reliance on the ISO-8859-1 coded character set,
which is appropriate only for Western European languages. Despite
this restriction, HTML has been widely used with other languages,
using other coded character sets or character encodings, through
various ad hoc extensions to the language [TAKADA].
This document is meant to address the issue of the
internationalization of HTML by extending the specification of HTML
and giving additional recommendations for proper internationalization
support. It is in good part based on a paper by one of the authors
on multilingualism on the WWW [NICOL]. A foremost consideration is
to make sure that HTML remains a valid application of SGML, while
enabling its use with all languages of the world.
The specific issues addressed are the SGML document character set to
be used for HTML, the proper treatment of the charset parameter
associated with the "text/html" content type and the specification of
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