Knowledge Is Power

The evolution of HTML has essentially stopped. Instead, HTML is being replaced by a new language, called XHTML. XHTML is in many ways similar to HTML, but is designed to work with the new eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, that will soon serve as the core language for designing all sorts of new Web applications, in which XHTML will be only one of many "languages." But, XHTML is designed to work with these other language, so that different documents, in different languages, can be easily mixed together.

 Flash was formerly called "Macromedia Flash", but is now relabeled as "Adobe Flash" since Adobe purchased Macromedia software in 2005.

Flash is streaming animation for web pages. Sometimes Flash is a portion of an html web page, and sometimes a web page is made entirely of Flash. Either way, Flash files are called "Flash movies". These are special .swf format files that beam to your web browser screen as you watch them.

Today, the Internet is positioned to be an international mechanism for communication and information exchange, the precursor of a global information superhighway. For this vision to be realized, one important requirement is to enable all languages to be technically available via the Internet, so that when a society is ready to absorb Internet technology, the language capability comes prepackaged. This is a nontrivial multilingual-information processing problem. To appreciate the extent of this issue, it is enough to know that few years ago, English was the native language of 80% of web users. Today, English is the mother tongue of less than half of web users. However, statistics show that the language of about 80% of web sites is English with only about 8% could be classified as multilingual 

From the numbers above, making a website universally usable is an important issue and ignoring it may lead to groups of users suffering isolation, rather than enjoying the true interoperability alluded to by the very name of the World Wide Web. However designing websites in languages other than English or multilingual websites confronts designers with many requirements. These requirements generally fall into three categories: data representation, data display and data input requirements . This paper studies these requirements, gives general recommendations for meeting them and provides a list of guidelines for web pages designers. It also gives examples of successful websites implemented in different languages.