There has been a bit of a debate in local government circles about how to manage community languages on the web. Some council websites do this much better than others.

Perhaps there ought to be a bigger debate about this. (Although where exactly would it take place with the proliferation of little used discussion forums on various sites?)

One of the best resources from an advice point of view, and I’m sure a resource which lots of councils use is multikulti . The site is now in Unicode which means the user does not need to try and open PDFs.

I was also impressed by the use of the vernacular at the Scottish Parliament website.

I’m not that convinced about the supposed ’semantic web’ but it would be a huge step forward if the web was written in a way that people could understand, in a language that was familiar to them.

It certainly also raises interesting questions about the role of metadata and categorisation and whether colloquial and local terms will eventually be integrated into such projects.