and creating multilingual web pages, which was published in
August 1997 as 'The Multilingual Web Guide', in a Japanese
edition, the world's first book on such a subject."

Yoshi added in the same email interview: "Thousands of years
ago, in Egypt, China and elsewhere, people were more concerned
about communicating their laws and thoughts not in just one
language, but in several. In our modern world, most nation
states have each adopted one language for their own use. I
predict greater use of different languages and multilingual
pages on the internet, not a simple gravitation to American
English, and also more creative use of multilingual computer
translation. 99% of the websites created in Japan are written
in Japanese."

Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute
(WWLI), explained in September 1998: "A pull from non-English-
speaking computer users and a push from technology companies
competing for global markets has made localization a fast
growing area in software and hardware development. This
development has not been as fast as it could have been. The
first step was for ASCII to become Extended ASCII. This meant
that computers could begin to start recognizing the accents and
symbols used in variants of the English alphabet - mostly used
by European languages. But only one language could be displayed
on a page at a time. (...) The most recent development is
Unicode. Although still evolving and only just being
incorporated into the latest software, this new coding system
translates each character into 16 bytes. Whereas 8-byte
Extended ASCII could only handle a maximum of 256 characters,
Unicode can handle over 65,000 unique characters and therefore
potentially accommodate all of the world's writing systems on
the computer. So now the tools are more or less in place. They
are still not perfect, but at last we can at least surf the web
in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and numerous other languages that
don't use the Western alphabet. As the internet spreads to
parts of the world where English is rarely used - such as
China, for example, it is natural that Chinese, and not
English, will be the preferred choice for interacting with it.
For the majority of the users in China, their mother tongue
will be the only choice."

Ten years later, in 2008, 50% of all the documents available on
the internet were encoded in Unicode, with the other 50%
encoded in ASCII. ASCII is still very useful, especially the
o