W3C Internationalization Checker

Version 2.0.3 of the checker moves away from checking against particular specifications to checking how a page will work in a browser. For the most part, it assumes that pages will be parsed using an HTML5 compliant parser. Pages served as application/xhtml+xml have some significant differences with regards to character encoding and language declarations, however, and these are taken into account if the checker detects that the page being checked is served as XML.

The following new checks were added. Follow the links for details.

• UTF-8 BOM disagrees with another declaration
• Non-preferred name used for legacy character encoding
• Character encoding declaration named an unsupported encoding
• A language subtag is invalid
• A language attribute uses a grandfathered value
• A language attribute uses zh-CN or zh-TW
• Escaped characters addressing control code range
• Incorrect values used for translate attribute
• The align attribute is used
• Incorrect character escapes for supplementary characters
• Consider using dir='rtl' on the html tag
• No rtl markup found
• CSS is being used to set direction
• bdo tag found with dir attribute set to auto
• Invalid directional named character entities found
• Found Unicode code points for directional controls
• Found escape sequences for paired directional controls
• Unpaired directional controls found

The descriptive text was updated for the following check results, mostly to incorporate new recommendations post HTML5, or to accommodate the change in focus mentioned above.

• UTF-8 BOM found at start of file
• XML declaration used
• No effective character encoding information
• meta encoding declarations don't work with XML
• Incorrect use of meta encoding declarations
• charset attribute used on a or link elements
• No character encoding information
• A tag uses an xml:lang attribute without an associated lang attribute
• A tag uses a lang attribute without an associated xml:lang attribute
• A language attribute value was incorrectly formed
• Content-Language meta element used

New rows were added to the information table:

• All language tags: lists all language tags used in the page. If you click on any of the language tags listed, you are taken to the Language Subtag Lookup tool, which provides information about validity of the subtags used, lists their meaning, and provides additional usage tips.
• Unicode control codes: lists directional controls used in the document, with a frequency count for each. The list is divided to reflect actual characters vs. numeric character references vs. named character references.
• Notable attributes: lists attributes used that are typically associated with features needed by an international audience.
• Notable elements: the same, but for elements.