ian people, for
instance, without "Kreyol" (Creole for the non-initiated), the language
that has evolved and bound various African tribes transplanted in Haiti
during the slavery period? It is the most palpable exponent of
commonality that defines us as a people. However, it is primarily a
spoken language, not a widely written one. I see the web changing this
situation more so than any traditional means of language dissemination.
In Windows on Haiti, the primary language of the site is English, but
one will equally find a center of lively discussion conducted in
"Kreyol". In addition, one will find documents related to Haiti in
French, in the old colonial creole, and I am open to publishing others
in Spanish and other languages. I do not offer any sort of translation,
but multilingualism is alive and well at the site, and I predict that
this will increasingly become the norm throughout the web."

ENCODING: FROM ASCII TO UNICODE

= [Quote]

Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI),
explained in September 1998: "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."

= Encoding in Project Gutenberg

Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code
for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for
information interchange in English. It was pub