The World Wide Web can be seen as a single large application. To achieve consistent behaviour for internationalization and localization in such a context is important but seems difficult. Large amounts of data may be needed for some functionality, and they may not be available locally. Examples include data for sorting orders, regular expressions, formatting and styling.

Strategies to solve these problems will be explained using the example of a draft XML-based notation for Character Collections. XML guarantees interchangeability and basic internationalization. The design of the format in addition allows incomplete specifications, lazy evaluation, differential and alternative definitions. This together with the caching mechanisms built into the web infrastructure leads to compact and efficient processing. In addition, the fact that data is referenced by a Web Address (URI) makes it possible to reference such definitions in other protocols and formats.