Design Considerations for Multilingual Web Sites

Abstract

The most powerful marketing, service, and information-distribution tool a library has today is its Web site, but providing Web content in many languages is complex. Before allocating scarce technical and financial resources, it is valuable to learn about writing systems, types of writing, how computers render and represent writing systems, and to study potential problem areas and their possible solutions. The accepted Web standard for presenting languages is Unicode and a full understanding of its history and the coding tools it provides is essential to making appropriate decisions for specific multilingual and internationalization projects. Actual coding examples, as well as a sampling of existing multilingual library services, also serve to illuminate the path of implementation.