W3C Internationalization Checker
Is your Web site internationalized?
The W3C Internationalization Checker is a free service by W3C that provides information about internationalization features of your page, and provides advice on how to improve your use of internationalization markup.
Getting internationalization features right at the beginning saves a lot of time and trouble if you ever need to use your content in a language-sensitive way in the future. However, the test will also throw up issues that could cause you problems straight away, such as those related to character encodings and to non-normalized class and id names.
The first part of the report for a page lists key internationalization settings related to character encoding, language declarations, text direction and class/id names. This information includes HTTP headers, which can be particularly useful for troubleshooting problems.
The second part of the report lists errors, warnings and helpful suggestions based on your use (or not) of internationalization-related markup. The report also points you to resources where you can read more about the topic in question.
The checker is still only a prototype, so there are guarranteed to be bugs and missing features. It will slowly improve over the coming months, but it has been made available for use since it is likely to be helpful to many people already. If you have suggestions for ways to improve the checker, please fill in the feedback form.
Note that the checker supports HTML4, HTML5 and XHTML 1.0 served as text/html, and XHTML 1.0 served as application/xhtml+xml. It hasn't yet been developed to produce issue reports for XHTML5 or XHTML 1.1, however the information panel at the top of the page should work fine for those formats.
The hope is to eventually merge features of this checker with other checkers and validators at the W3C, once it reaches an appropriate level of maturity.
The Internationalization Activity section of the W3C site points to some internationalization-related tools.
In addition to this checker, the W3C is offering a number of other tools to help you check various types of documents (HTML, XHTML, CSS, RDF, P3P, ...), find broken links in your Web pages, and so on. All these tools are listed on the W3C's QA Toolbox.
The W3C also hosts a number of other Open Source software projects.
The user interface of the W3C Internationalization Checker was derived from that of the W3C mobileOK checker. Richard Ishida is developing the checker at the W3C. The MultilingualWeb project partners are also providing feedback on the checker.