(di prossima traduzione)

Even written communication over the Internet meets with some structural constraints. In order to reach everyone, until recent we had to use the ASCII set, which is limited to 128 characters. The ASCII set does not contain the stressed vowels or "special" characters necessary for European languages other than English. More recently, especially with the diffusion of the Web, ISO-8859-1, also called ISO-LATIN-1, became the standard both on the Internet and in some popular operating systems. It is an open, non-proprietary standard, developed by the International Standard Organization and able to represent all Western European Languages. ISO-8859-x with its 10 subsets represents many other alphabetic scripts, including Cyrillic and Arabic, it fails though to represent scripts based on ideograms such as kanji and Chinese characters, mainly because of the number of signs to be represented. Unicode, a proprietary standard, developed by a non-profit organization, among the groups of character sets seems to be the closest to a solution of global representation. Individual solution for the representation of non-Latin scripts have sprung up and become widely used especially for Japanese and Chinese.

This structural constraint stems from the fact that the Internet was born and is being developed mainly in the United States, with the rest of the world playing a peripheral role. Even so, on every electronic open forum, including NEWS, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the thousands of existing mailing lists, Gopher and especially the Web, we witness a great deal of communication in a growing variety of languages. To use these services, people often do not give up their native language; they rather adapt the limited means of expression to their needs. In the case of Italian, which offers relatively few problems, the stressed vowels become double characters, such as a', e', i', o' and u'. In the extreme case of Mandarin, one may run a simple software interface to a graphic display (for example ZWDOS) before entering a NEWS or IRC client, or even an E-Mail manager. The characters on the screen will then transform into Chinese ideograms decripted from ASCII sequences.