s 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.

3. <Technological developments.> 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. There is a change-over period,
of course. Much of the technical terminology on the web is still not
translated into other languages. And as we found with our Multilingual
Glossary of Internet Terminology -- known as NetGlos -- the translation
of these terms is not always a simple process. Before a new term
becomes accepted as the 'correct' one, there is a period of instability
where a number of competing candidates are used. Often an English loan
word becomes the starting point -- and in many cases the endpoint. But
eventually a winner emerges that becomes codified into published
technical dictionaries as well as the everyday interactions of the
nontechnical user. The latest version of NetGlos is the Russian one and
it should be available in a couple of weeks or so [at the end of
September 1998]. It will no doubt be an excellent example of the
ongoing, dynamic process of 'russification' of web terminology.

4. <Linguistic democracy.> Whereas 'mother-tongue education' was deemed
a human right for every child in the world by a UNESCO report in the
early '50s, 'mother-tongue surfing' may very well be the Information
Age equivalent. If the internet is to truly become the Global Network
that it is promoted as being, then all users, regardless of language
background, should have access to it. To keep the internet as the
preserve of those who, by historica