At 00/12/03 08:03 +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,
Sorry, but I think that's the main topic of the article (as far
as I can deduce from the abstract), and it is also the main
threat to create balkanization. The problem currently is not
that Chinese domain names may create a disconnect between
the "Chinese Internet" and some other part of the Internet,
but that there are various proposals and actors that are
working on Chinese domain names, and that all of them act
prematurely (i.e. before there is an IETF spec) and with
side interests that affect things negatively.
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?
Reasonable question indeed. If the content is Chinese, does it hurt if the
address is also Chinese? There are cases where it indeed hurts (such as when
you have fonts to display Chinese on your system, but nothing to input
Chinese, as may be the case if you work off an English OS of some kind).
However, in general and for the majority of actual users (i.e. for
the Chinese users reading Chinese web pages,...), having Chinese
domain names is actually a big advantage. They are easier to
memorize, easier to guess, easier to identify with, and so on.
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.
At the *linguistic* level, there are certain rather hard boundaries
based on the difficulty of learning foreign languages and on the
slow advances of machine translation. At the social level, boundaries
should be kept as low as possible.
Regards, Martin.