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ARE YOU SPEAKING TO ME? Barely a day goes by that I don't see the three letters "www" whether on my computer screen or in a print publication and sprinkled throughout television commercials. I think it's safe to say that everyone reading this article knows what those letters stand for: double-U, double-U, double-U, the World Wide Web. In an attempt to rid ourselves of the awkward multisyllabic tongue-twister we've shortened the term and taken to calling this electronic medium simply "the web." And in doing so we seem to have forgotten all about the World part. According to some global statistics http://www.glreach.com/globstats/ 40% of the current web population is comprised of non-english speaking people. Not surprising when you consider that the majority of the world at large is comprised of non-english speaking people. Something that is all too often forgotten in the United States. Soon the web population will begin to reflect real world population distributions as the unwired world's majority slowly ventures online. And while the prospect of a truly international web might have just occurred to you the World Wide Web Consortium has been planning ahead, helping to usher in flexible HTML standards that allow you to design pages for, well, the whole wide world.
Before you dig into the language-specific aspects of good global web design you
should take stock of the worldliness of your site a whole. If you have forms is there
enough space for foreign addresses and codes? Many online forms set a 5 digit limit for
zip codes which instantly prevents people in most other countries from being able to
enter accurate information. If you're collecting personal information of a particularly
detailed nature you should definitely be aware that European data privacy laws are far
more strict than those in the US. http://nytimes.com/library/tech/98/10/ Assuming you've set your sites on the global village you're going to have to speak in a language they understand. Any language begins with a set of characters. English and Latin have a character set comprised of 26 simple letters with no accents or other unique characters and technology being english-language-centric saw to it that the original 7-bit character encoding scheme accommodated only the native basics in the now familiar ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). In the 80s the 8-bit character encoding scheme was introduced to allow for alphabets with additional letters like Greek and Cyrillic as well as to introduce the world's favorite accented characters such as the è the ñ and the ü Quite a number of 8-bit schemes cropped up for everything from the romance languages through Hebrew and Arabic. Later 16-bit encoding schemes were hatched to allow for as many as 65,536 individual characters which make it possible to create web sites in ideographical languages like Japanese and Chinese. All of this is great so long as your browser knows which character encoding scheme you're using. Which is precisely where the "charset" attribute comes in via the jack-of-all-tags, the META tag. For instance, to tell a browser to display the incoming data using the Japanese "euc-jp" character set the META tag would look like the following: <META http-equiv="Content-Type" Content="text/html; charset=euc-jp"> Keep in mind of course that your visitors must have browsers that support whatever character encoding you specify. You can get a feel for this by checking out your own browser's preferences to get an idea what sets are available. A similar but entirely different way to convey language-specific information to a browser is via the LANG attribute. The LANG attribute can be used in tandem with almost any main HTML container tag such as <HTML> <BODY>, <P> and even <B> or <I>. The language tag doesn't govern the display of text (and nor does it do any translation for you!). What it is used for is enable search engines and speech synthesizers to handle the information more adeptly. Again in the META tag the LANG attribute can be used in conjunction with keyword specification which can improve your international search results. You could, for example, have different keywords specified in separate META tags for different languages:
<META name="keywords" lang="en" content="vacations, Mexico, sunshine"> Lastly, one final search engine tip for increasing your international visibility is to use the LINK element. The LINK element allows you to specify the location of translated documents. How this works is that a search engine indexing your site will be able to present search results tailored to specific language requirements. You might have your home page (call it "home.html") written in English but you could have a translation in Spanish (perhaps "home-spanish.html"). By placing a LINK tag in the HEAD of your primary home page results listing sites for a spanish speaking web searcher would point that visitor directly toward the spanish page. That LINK tag specifying the Spanish-language alternate ("home-spanish.html") to your "home.html" would have the form of: <LINK rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="home-spanish.html" hreflang="es" lang="fr" title="Mi Pgina"> That pretty much wraps up this language course. You've got the right HTML but I'm afraid you're on your own now that it comes to picking up a few of the more conversational languages. Buena suerte, amigos mios. For further reading:
On Character Encoding:
On The W3C's International Activities
On the European Union Data Protection Directive
About The Language Code Specification
BUILDING INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC
Web Site Journal, Copyright 1999 by Netscape. Now that you have designed your site with multiple languages it is important that it can be found globally. The best way to draw in visitors from other countries is to ensure your site is listed with International search engines and directories. Just to name a few, Yahoo!, Excite, and AltaVista offer multiple versions of their search services based in different languages. Don't forget to register with these International search engines to ensure your site can be found by the audience you are targeting. Here are a few links to get you on your way!
AltaVista:
Excite:
Yahoo!
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