The goal of this paper is to illustrate how users can ensure global interoperability of the systems and technologies they deploy on the World Wide Web.

The many technologies used today to exploit the power of the web are based on a set of established and emerging standards, and are evolving at an extraordinary rate. Users want to exploit these technologies to provide ever more powerful and flexible solutions. Unfortunately, this is not always as straightforward as it might be: specifically, what does one have to do to make these systems work together globally?

This presentation will attempt to show how those technologies commonly in use today (HTML, XML, Java, etc.), as well as their newer counterparts (SOAP, Web Services, etc.), can be linked together to ensure a seamless web-based system that can correctly process data, no matter where it originates. In other words, a Chinese user should be able to access an Arabic SOAP service, hosted on a Cyrillic server completely transparently.

Despite sounding rather daunting, any web-based system can be made behave itself in a global environment: it just needs a little know-how and care.