THE *WORLD WIDE*WEB

"Widespread 

support on 

the Web

 for the 

international 

Unicode

 standard

 will be a 

significant

 step toward

 addressing

 the global

 communication

 challenge." 

Widespread support on the Web for the international Unicode standard will be a significant step toward addressing this global communication challenge. Unicode provides platform- and language-independent building blocks that can be used to create content and applications in a variety of languages - and even in multiple languages. For example, a human resources information bulletin can be translated into English, German, Spanish, and Japanese, all within the same document. Unicode also reduces dependence on the operating system for language and font support. Right now if you want to view Japanese kanji, you need to have a Japanese operating system and a Japanese font - or you need to use third-party products to get around these requirements - to render the characters properly; if you don't, you get garbage on your screen. To put this in perspective, I would compare Unicode to HTML - a standard that, when widely adopted, makes the underlying technology and infrastructure accessible to many more people, and consequently, is much more valuable. Future Netscape products are being designed to support the Unicode standard. We recognize, however, that some of our customers have invested in legacy language-encoding schemes such as ShiftJIS and Big 5, which we intend to continue to support.

Along with support for the Unicode standard, we're planning to add functionality to Netscape products to provide users with a seamless multilingual experience. Today users must manually select different documents according to which language they want to view. Technology we're planning to add to Netscape SuiteSpot will allow content creators to store multiple versions of a document, in different languages, behind one URL. Our client and server software is being designed to automatically detect which language the user prefers and then select the appropriate document. In addition, Netscape Communicator is being designed to allow documents to contain text in multiple languages on the same page, which hasn't been possible to date. Searching documents written in different languages should also become more convenient: Our multilingual architecture is being designed to let users search across French, German, and Spanish documents, for example, with a single query rather than three separate ones.

We're working to make our development tools language-independent also. That means the Java applet a developer writes could automatically support Asian-language characters, for example. Certain data, such as the time and date, could automatically be presented in the format associated with each particular language. The goal is that developers won't have to think nearly as much about language-support issues, as a lot of it will be automatic.

Communication among people who speak different languages should also become easier. For example, Netscape Directory Server is being designed to hold information about people in their native languages. Japanese users should no longer be forced to see their names written only in roman-letter English spellings, but could also see them written in kanji characters. So an English-speaking employee working in a subsidiary in Paris could use the English-language spelling to look up a Japanese colleague's address in Tokyo, but could print the kanji spelling on a letter. Over time, I see cross-language communication improving further as we work with partners to create tools for translating "on the fly." A Japanese-language email could be translated automatically to English when it hits a user's in-box, for example. Initially the translations may not be perfect, but they should be good enough to let users understand the content of most emails.

Ultimately all of these improvements should greatly enhance our ability to communicate globally. Soon, for example, Japanese business executives should be able to log on to their corporate intranets from anywhere in the world and work as effectively as if they were in their offices in Japan. They should be able to read and input Japanese text, regardless of whether the particular operating system they're using supports it. They should also be able to receive their familiar working environments over the network by using Netscape Netcaster, and be able to find and communicate with colleagues, inside or outside the company, whether or not those colleagues speak Japanese. With all of these upcoming improvements, the name *World Wide* Web is starting to sound a lot more appropriate.