The Multilingual WWW

In the early WWW, HTTP and HTML were cast in terms of ISO8859-1. To many this was total anathema, and in 1994, people really started becoming concerned about the global interoperability of the WWW, and so discussions about WWW I18N came up. I ended up getting quite involved and wrote a paper called "The Multilingual WWW" (also available in PDF)). This paper has served as the basis for many of the I18N features found in the WWW today, including RFC 2070, the document character set of XML, etc.Of course, this would never have been possible without the help of people like Martin Duerst, Fracois Yergeau, Glenn Adams, et al.

The central theme here is really to look at the WWW as a single, large application, that is used by people all around the world. This has fairly significant impact on the general approaches and architectures one might take.