There is no doubt that the World Wide Web has mostly excluded the majority of the world, by developing mostly applications that use the the Latin and West Eurpean character sets mostly. This is rapidly changing now. Standards were developed. However, it remains to be adhered to by both software manufacturers and web developers.
Well-translated material is a valuable resource that should be shared, if appropraite as is the case of international organizations, with the whole world, not only in hard copies.
This page discusses the issues of standards. Examples of good and bad practices are also given. The aim is to give those organizations and/or web developers interested in designing multilingual WWW pages a quick and accurate start.
Some of the links in the reference section are technical. Those for general rading are placed first.
Internationalization
of the WWW The
Multilingual World Wide Web: an introduction.Complete
reading of the document is a must for professionals. Why
are you advocating Accentsoft? Choosing
a multilingual PC product. A book review Creating
your own multilingual Web Site. Available in both English and French
from the Bable Project. The
Standard ISO 8859 UNICODE
support by the major software developers ANSI
or UNICODE What
the future holds? An example. Internationalization
of HTML
The following sites offer you the option of choosing the language. A multilingual browser is needed.
UN-Demo.
Accentsoft International Inc. USA Alis
Technologies Inc. Canada. Video
On Line (VOL). Italy. The best personal and business multilingual pages
The
ten Best Global Site
award winners
For
Windows 95 For
the Mac 
This is the Line Around the World. It's an effort to get people all around
this beautiful planet of ours to be nice to each other. And while we're
at it, we might as well meet other great people on the World Wide Web.
The way it works is this: A list is being kept, in exact order, of people
who've registered to be part of this line. Each person connects to the
people in front and in back of her/him on that list, forming one long line
around the internet But the great part is that all the people who include
themselves in this line are honor-bound to go out of their way to perform
an act of goodness. This could be anything from giving 5 dollars or more
to the charity of your choice to making lunch for the homeless man out
on the corner to complimenting everyone you meet for a month. It's different
for different people, but all these people want to do something to make
life happier and better. If you might like to join, simply click on the
line for more information.
Use
this meta tag <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO 8859/x"> Remeber
"Content is king". Use
the standard ISO 8859/x. Keep
in mind Lynx users. Do not use imagemaps or other unnecessary graphics. If
you have to use graphics, always fill in the alt="appropraite text
here" If
you have to use graphics use interlaced GIF. State height and width of
the graphic. Do
not use electronic translators. If you do not know a language, do not write
in it. Always
validate your HTML, especially for Lynx. Always
start with an English page state what the site is about and any special
browsers needed. Keep
in mind the economic and communication infrastructure of your target audience.
If you have questions, comments or useful URLs, please contact fits@servtech.com