At 03:03 03/12/00, Graham Klyne wrote:
I guess one of the first questions should be; "Is some partitioning of the
Internet community such a bad thing?"
A partioning based on nationality, which is of course
different than language group, would be harmful. Lack of
interoperability of standard protocols would be bad, for
whatever reason, including incompatible localisations. Lack
of standards support for internationalisation/multi-lingual
computing, as different from localisation, would also be bad.
Why should it matter if, say, Chinese-based domains aimed
at Chinese audiences are not meaningfully accessible to
non-Chinese Internet users?
What about people who can read and perhaps also write
in Chinese characters but who are not Chinese (either ROC
on Taiwan or PRC on the mainland) nationals ? Consider
not only folks in Singapore or SE Asia generally, but also
Chinese-capable folks in other places (e.g. North America,
Europe). [NB: I'm deliberately ignoring the issues with
Traditional vs Simplified characters just now, though that
is also part of the internationalisation equation].
I regularly read my news from British or Hong Kong
or other countries' web sites. Living in North America,
I'm certainly not the target audience for the HK Standard
or South China Morning Post. However, I do read those
newspapers online. Less regularly, but occasionally,
I do read Chinese web sites (in Chinese) or Japanese web
sites (reading the Kanji portion only). I am most assuredly
NOT the target audience for any of these web sites.
On a daily basis, I receive mail with Chinese language
contents, though a surprising amount of that turns out to
be unsolicted bulk email in my own case. I receive a modest
amount of German or Vietnamese email. So multi-lingual protocol
capabilities are quite important to me.
So for all those reasons, it does in fact matter
a great deal.
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.
I do think so.
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.
I don't want to try to predict the future, so I won't.
I can say that today, we are NOT anywhere close to a reasonable
end point or stopping point for internationalisation of IETF
standards-track protocols. In particular, we haven't resolved
the basic internationalisation issues for a number of core
infrastructure protocols (e.g. DNS).
Regards,
Ran
rja(_at_)inet(_dot_)org