Why do we do develop multilingual Web sites? What is the ROI? Why is it difficult? The fall of English; the complexity of code.

The basic technologies comprising the Web are explained very simply and visually with examples. The chapter covers HTTP, HTML, XML and the two style sheet standards: CSS and XSL. Scripting languages, such as ASP, Javascript and Perl, are also briefly described.

A Web site cannot usually be sent as an email attachment nor can you just "take it where it is". Preparing a Web site for translation, be it internal or external, be it a one-shot translation or an on-going maintenance, requires a thorough understanding of how

An overview of character sets from ASCII to UNICODE and UTF-8. The HTML and XML features to identify character sets. Entering foreign language characters in HTML or XML. The reference internationalization model and the impact of Unicode data representation.

Getting the user to the right page!
How HTML pages identify language and encoding. How the server, browser and user participate in determining the actual encoding. How controls should be designed to allow language navigation.

How to structure HTML pages, forms, links and style sheets for international Web sites. Actual examples are created live with a small Web server.

How to structure a multilingual site and support navigation through it. Choosing a domain name. DNS & IDN, URL & IRL; how do they work? what do they mean? How to organize and store text and graphics. How to modify the database. How to build and deploy Web content (baking vs frying).

This section builds up graphically, item by item, a complete reference model of the globalization process, starting from a source Web site and going through all the steps (change detection, analysis, costing, workload management, translation, quality assurance, etc.) to produce localized Web sites in several languages.