Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

Internet 247I18n and L10n are sometimes used for internationalizationand localization, respectively (the numbers in each wordrefer to the number of letters in the alphabet between theletters). The two processes are complementary.Internationalization involves designing programs sothey will be as easy as possible to adapt to a variety of culturalsettings. For example, the Unicode character set ispreferred because it can accommodate most of the world’salphabets and many other characters. Program code canalso be modularized such that date, time, and other formatsfor different countries can be loaded in and used as desired.Localization involves changing a number of aspectsof a software product (including user interface elementsand online help) to reflect the language and culture of theintended market. Some of this is fairly straightforward: formatsfor numbers, currency, date, and time; text collationand sorting order; and use of the keyboard (including specialkeys). To the extent the program has been appropriatelygeneralized (internationalized), it becomes easier to localizeit for each setting.Other aspects of localization can be subtler. Icons, forexample, may have to be changed because their supposedly“universal” meaning would not translate well into the localculture. Documentation may have to change wording toavoid conveying ideas that may be confusing or even offensive.Even more substantial localization may be required ifthe target environment (such as the education system) issubstantially different from that in the country where thesoftware was written. Generally this cannot be done automatically:the program must be reviewed by someone whois knowledgeable about the target language or culture.Further ReadingEsselink, Bert. A Practical Guide to Localization. Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins Publisher, 2000.Internationalization (I18n) Activity. World Wide Web Consortium.Available online. URL: http://www.w3.org/International/.Accessed September 23, 2007.Smith-Ferrier, Guy. .NET Internationalization: The Developer’sGuide to Building Global Windows and Web Applications. UpperSaddle River, N.J.: Addison-Wesley, 2007.InternetThe Internet is the worldwide network of all computers (ornetworks of computers) that communicate using a particularprotocol for routing data from one computer to another(see tcp/ip). As long as the programs they run follow therules of the protocol, the computers can be connected bya variety of physical means including ordinary and specialphone lines, cable, fiber optics, and even wireless or satellitetransmission.History and DevelopmentThe Internet’s origins can be traced to a project sponsoredby the U.S. Defense Department. Its purpose was to finda way to connect key military computers (such as thosecontrolling air defense radar and interceptor systems). Sucha system would require a great deal of redundancy, routingcommunications around installations that had beendestroyed by enemy nuclear weapons. The solution wasto break data up into individually addressed packets thatcould be dispatched by routing software that could findwhatever route to the destination was viable or most efficient.At the destination, packets would be reassembledinto messages or data files.By the early 1970s, a number of research institutionsincluding the pioneer networking firm Bolt Beranek andNewman (BBN), Stanford Research Institute (SRI), CarnegieMellon University, and the University of California at Berkeleywere connected to the government-funded and administeredARPANET (named for the Defense Department’sAdvanced Research Projects Agency). Gradually, as use ofthe ARPANET’s protocol spread, gateways were created toconnect it to other networks such as the National ScienceFoundation’s NSFnet. The growth of the network was alsospurred by the creation of useful applications includinge-mail and Usenet, a sort of bulletin-board service (see theApplications section below).Meanwhile, a completely different world of online networkingarose during the 1980s in the form of local bulletinboards, often connected using a store-and-forward systemcalled FidoNet, and proprietary online services such asCompuServe and America On-line. At first there were fewconnections between these networks and the ARPANET,which had evolved into a general-purpose network for theacademic community under the rubric of NSFnet. (It waspossible to send e-mail between some networks using specialgateways, but a number of different kinds of addresssyntax had to be used.)In the 1990s, the NSFnet was essentially privatized,passing from government administration to a corporationthat assigned domain names (see domain name system).However, the impetus that brought the Internet into thedaily consciousness of more and more people was the developmentof the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee at theEuropean particle research laboratory CERN (see Berners-Lee, Tim and world wide web). With a standard way todisplay and link text (and the addition of graphics and multimediaby the mid-1990s), the Web is the Internet as far asmost users are concerned (see Web browser). What hadbeen a network for academics and adventurous professionalsbecame a mainstream medium by the end of the decade(see also e-commerce).ApplicationsA number of applications are (or have been) important contributorsto the utility and popularity of the Internet.• E-mail was one of the earliest applications on theancestral ARPANET and remains the single most popularInternet application. Standard e-mail using SMTP(Simple Mail Transport Protocol) has been implementedfor virtually every platform and operating system.In most cases once a user has entered a person’se-mail address into the “address book,” e-mail can besent with a few clicks of the mouse. While failure ofthe outgoing or destination mail server can still block