Before you dig into the language-specific aspects of good global web design you should take stock of the worldliness of your site a whole. Many online forms set a 5 digit limit for zip codes which instantly prevents people in most other countries from being able to enter accurate information. Recent European Union directives governing the protection of personal data may hamper international commerce between the United States and European nations if the US government or business community fails to guarantee the security and privacy of its citizens' personal data. To meet international standards you might need to rethink what types of information you request and collect from your visitors and how that information is stored and shared. Assuming you've set your sites on the global village you're going to have to speak in a language they understand.
Any language begins with a set of characters.
Later 16-bit encoding schemes were hatched to allow for as many as 65,536 individual characters which make it possible to create web sites in ideographical languages like Japanese and Chinese. All of this is great so long as your browser knows which character encoding scheme you're using. You can get a feel for this by checking out your own browser's preferences to get an idea what sets are available. A similar but entirely different way to convey language-specific information to a browser is via the LANG attribute. The LANG attribute can be used in tandem with almost any main HTML container tag such as , and even or .