A final advantage of XML is that it has adopted ISO 10646, otherwise known as Unicode. This standard is used as a framework to encode characters and it will support most languages. Since XML follows this standard, it is possible to use any language for the markup. You can have Cyrillic names for the tags and any XML-aware software will still be able to understand it. XML doesn't force people to use English for their coding.
Internationalization is built right in.
However, if the text of the document is in Cyrillic, then people who only read English won't be able to understand the document. XML is not a translator, but it does break free of the English speaking world's bias in the document coding. Since the majority of the people who are on the World Wide Web don't have cutting edge software, they won't be able to view XML documents for quite some time. Research Samba as a protocol. Samba is freely available under the GNU General Public License.