Opera Developer News

Trip to Seoul

The folks in W3C Korea organized a HTML5 Asia Day last week. The CJK community gathered to discuss some of the common issues and interest we share. One might wonder why there are only three locale/language-oriented interest group in W3C, namely China, Japan and Korea or collectively called CJK. There are good reasons for it, given that this area constitute a big part of the Internet users and hence also web developer community. Despite the size, there is a lack of participation. CJK is therefore created to encourage more people from this area to participate in W3C.

Another reasoning is that CJK has specific requirement for the Web. W3C have helped shape the web and local knowledge will always be important. Ruby, vertical text, web fonts are amongst the interesting standards that we could offer input from a different perspective.

The HTML5 Chinese Interest Group was officially formed March last year though the W3C mailing list has started since August 2010. So if you count the latter, we have been around for two years. Currently we have close to 700 members and there's a myriad of things we discuss, not just HTML5, from CJK encoding, to HTML5 WG happenings, to even browser support banter.

I'd like to break down some of the things we have done in the Chinese IG.

Translation

We have translated these specifications drafts: Media Queries, Web Storage, Vibration API, DeviceOrientation, cssom-view, HTML5 differences from HTML4, DOM4 (90% completion), File API(80％ completion).

A special shoutout goes to the translators especially Kennyluck, Otakustay, Winter, pingooo, Jinks Zhao, Xiao GuangNiu(牛晓光), Dong Xun Jin(金东勋) and Zhong Jian(中剑).

W3C feedback

We have been able to submit feedbacks to the W3C. So far the IG have submitted four proposals. nine suggestions and seven bug reports. (text-decoration-skip is accepted). The recent css3-flexbox that went into last call，we have made five suggestions and of them two were excepted [1] [2].

Where are the others?

We have seen an increase of Chinese interest in W3C such as the recent Chinese browser session in the AC meeting in France. It will be interesting to see more participation in the HTML5 Chinese IG too.

Even though I work for Opera, our hope is that more companies, especially browser vendors to participate in this group. There are many good people from companies like Google and Firefox. Not forgetting Chinese browser vendors such as UC, Dolphin, Maxthon, 360. It will be good if such voices are heard too.