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Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

2000-12-03 10:30:03
There's a news story at:

  http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2000-2/1201f.html#item10

under the heading "Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?"

Leaving aside the issues of competing registries, touched upon in that article, I had been wondering with the formation of IDN WG how I18N would affect cross-character-type-boundary Internet activities.

I guess one of the first questions should be; "Is some partitioning of the Internet community such a bad thing?". Why should it matter if, say, Chinese-based domains aimed at Chinese audiences are not meaningfully accessible to non-Chinese Internet users? At a purely technological level, the priority ascribed to the end-to-end architecture of the Internet has underpinned and presumed non-discriminatory any-to-any communication. I wonder if this is a reasonable expectation at the social level of Internet use.

#g

PS: I think it is without doubt that it is a Good Thing that we make efforts to internationalize protocols; my comments/questions are an attempt to explore how far this process can reasonable go.

------------
Graham Klyne
(GK(_at_)ACM(_dot_)ORG)