In my opinion, it is vital to craft Internet's evolution so as to maintain
full connectivity and interworking among all its parts. I do not see
"balkanization" as a good thing at all. I believe there are sound technical
means to achieve the objective of incorporating character sets associated
with non-roman languages but that critics need to understand more fully just
how important the limitations of the current character set for domain names
have been in maintaining interworking and also ability of so many applications
to incorporate and refer to domain names. The IA4 alphabet includes essentially
just the letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and the "-" (dash). This is the limit of what
is allowed in domain names today.
Incorporating other character sets without deep technical consideration will
risk the inestimable value of interworking across the Internet. It CAN be done
but there is a great deal of work to make it function properly.
Vint
At 08:03 AM 12/3/2000 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
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)