Rationale
The Unicode CLDR already contains a large number of elements (e.g. selected typographical conventions) that can be unambiguously described and used to enable localized applications to use versions of those elements that are appropriate for the chosen locale. All of these elements are intended to represent what a person from that locale would naturally expect to see. Care is taken to avoid a situation where the CLDR imposes a usage policy that differs from common usage.
However, there are instances where the content of localized services are expected to conform to a usage policy that differs from that commonly understood in a locale. Such a policy is often referred to as a "House Style". Two common examples of such house styles include:
- multi-national corporations that wish to adopt a common house style that can be applied in every country in which they operate;
- official documents in public administrations that span a number of different locales.
It is this latter situation that is particularly relevant in the context of eGovernment. There are many eGovernment administrative regions that span many countries and also those that apply to countries that have multiple languages and cultures within a single country. In such cases, a common house style can reduce or eliminate confusions caused by the application of the common usage conventions from the individual locales to documents and services that apply across this range of locales.
One major example of such a house style is the "Interinstitutional style guide" of the Publications office of the European Union. This is written to assist authors of official documents and translators to use conventions that conform to the official house style policy rather than the common usage conventions that the author or translator may be more familiar with. In this Workshop it is proposed that the CLDR elements of house styles in general, and those that relate to the European eGovernment context in particular, are integrated into the CLDR hierarchy either as variants of the relevant locale data for that culture or as specific locales applying to the region European Union. Adopting this approach would have a number of benefits:
- these resources would be, for the first time, available in a form that could be used in a way identical to the well-supported ways in which other CLDR resources can be used (e.g., using software and tools that are designed around the CLDR);
- this would open up the market for the suppliers of eGovernment services by making readily usable resources available to companies from within and outside the relevant eGovernment administration area;
- these resources could be principally owned and maintained as a niche within the CLDR structure by the responsible administration that is setting the house policies, yet be linked to from the standard CLDR pages to maximise their availability. Although this approach doesn't lend itself to the normal use of the CLDR Survey Tool to supply and vet the data, it should have a minimum impact on those responsible for maintaining the CLDR. These resources would be assigned either variant or region codes to ensure that they are distinguished in a clear way from the resources intended for general usage. This Workshop is the ideal vehicle to propose the introduction of such a new type of CLDR usage and to assist in the adoption of such a proposal by the Unicode Consortium.
House styles also formalize many typographic conventions that are not at present covered in the CLDR. Some of these conventions lend themselves to be added to the CLDR, whereas others such as the proper use of highlighting or tables are mainly or exclusively information targeted at human users and cannot readily be covered in the CLDR context. This information constitutes however a valuable information resource in eGov-Share and is accordingly covered by the ontology of cultural elements.