The World Wide Web Consortium on Tuesday published a proposal defining a way for Web applications to transmit and process the world’s languages, based on the Unicode standard.The organization’s Character Model of the World Wide Web: Fundamentals proposal was published as a W3C Recommendation, meaning it has been formally approved by the organization. “The basic idea is that people around the world need to have Web technology which can be used for their scripts and their languages,” said Richard Ishida, editor at character model specifications at W3C. Through the architectural Recommendation, specification authors, developers and content developers have a common reference to enable interoperable text manipulation of the World Wide Web. The recommendation builds on the Universal Character Set defined by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Unicode provides a way to reference characters independent of the coding of the text. W3C has further work to do on its Character Model proposal for internationalization. Models are still to be released for normalization, which involves representing text in Unicode, and resource identifiers, which provides guidelines for dealing with Web addresses. The two remaining models are expected to be completed by the end of the year, according to W3C.The Character Model was developed by the W3C Internationalization Activity Working Group with assistance from the organization’s Internationalization Interest Group. Participants in the working group have included Boeing, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and webMethods. Technology Industry