Given the importance of the World Wide Web to communication in all walks of life, and as the share of English web pages decreases and that of languages spoken in the European Union and around the world increases, the importance of ensuring the multilingual viability of the World Wide Web is of paramount importance. In order to build on current internationalization of the Web and move it forward, it is important to raise awareness of existing best practices and standards related to managing content on the multilingual Web, and look forward to what remains to be done. This project is coordinated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization of currently around 400 member organizations worldwide from research and industry, headed by the Web''s inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Twenty two partners, representing stakeholders from a range of affected areas, are also helping to run the project. The core of the project will focus around 4 workshops, held over a two year period, where the public will be invited to learn about and discuss standards and best practices, and get a clearer view of where we stand and what gaps need to be addressed. In parallel with, but not funded by, the project, the W3C will be developing some practical tools that include an internationalization checker for HTML, a proposed outline for training, and results for tests related to internationalization. Expected impacts of the project * Contribute to better awareness of standards and best practices in the area of the multilingual Web. * Provide a catalyst for future projects in the area of multilingual Web standardization, best practices and tool development. * Develop relationships and awareness of shared issues across organizations, scientific disciplines and academic/industrial boundaries. * Improve use of multilingual standards and best practices in the creation of pages using (X)HTML and CSS by content developers. * Improve support for multilingual features in Web user agents. Why standards matter Standards and best practices enable interoperability of data, which in turn maximises the potential for access to information, ensures longevity and usability of data, and improves the efficiency of processes for producing, localizing and disseminating information. This project is particularly concerned with increasing interoperability and encouraging coherence across the multilingual Web. Standards provide targets that push applications to consider the requirements for supporting multilingual aspects of the Web for creation, display and management of content. Important standardisation work has already been done or is in progress to establish a base for multilingual deployment of the Web. Organizations such as the W3C and the IETF, for example, have worked on the use of Unicode in Web technologies, roll-out of Internationalized Domain Names, development of standardised language tags, etc., Nevertheless, people producing multilingual content for the Web feel that there remain a number of barriers to full multilingual roll-out of information and tools, and these need to be identified.