The same holds true for the shareware domain . The most obvious obstacle to appropriate internationalization is language. German ain't Hindi ain't Mandarin. Today's sites are grounded in language, and American sites today tend to be heavily text-oriented. Even though the HotWired Network enjoys an international audience, we'd be hard pressed to pass off Packet as something designed with global participation in mind.
Most sites truly reflect their national origins and languages.
This one is pretty darned American. Accent Software Intl Ltd. There are even efforts to machine translate Web pages . The Holy Grail of machine translation notwithstanding, I will argue that language is going to play less and less of a role as the Web becomes more and more global. Just as we have global traffic signs, we'll have global Internet icons. Within the next 18 months, we'll see corporate Web pages striving for global presence become more comic-like.