At 00/12/04 19:58 -0500, Eric Brunner wrote:
> I guess one of the first questions should be; "Is some partitioning of
the
> Internet community such a bad thing?"...
If the "partition" intended for discussion is "@sign vs !path" addressing
conventions, Eric Allman and Peter Honeyman have left a discussion archive
on the subject.
Any pointers?
Arguably the universalist thesis understated the drawbacks
of anyone having the capability of addressing everyone anywhere. Clueless
users is only one possible policy model -- a point made by Peter then, and
equally valid now.
Personally I'm underwhelmed by the universalism advocated by the members
of the UNICODE Consortium, a single encoding scheme of necessity comes to
peripheral markets late in their adoption of computerized writing systems,
and their integration into a rationalized global system is not obviously a
boon to their pre-integration service models.
Unicode came late to everybody's adoption of computerization of writing.
Most probably the delay is much longer for central markets than for
peripheral markets, but that would have to be checked.
Also, one main factor in the delay in many cases is the amount of time
it takes for the specific 'market' to agree on a single encoding scheme,
or encoding table, locally. In some cases (e.g. Korean), this is due to
the wide range of choices that the script offers for encoding. In other
cases, this is due to the fact that it takes some time (up to one
generation) for all the people who have proposed and implemented
different encodings not only to realize that everybody would benefit
from a single encoding, but also to accept that to a large extent,
which single encoding is chosen is by way less important than that
a single one is chosen.
On the up-side, large user bases need not adapt to extraneous requirements
for participating in the "Internet community", and Universalist Credos may
fail in the markets (plural intended).
I think there is a difference between making it technically possible
for everybody to participate in whatever community they want, and
forcing anybody to do so. Internet technology has shown that it's
quite usable in local circumstances (the best example in Intranets).
Regards, Martin.