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Re: i18n name badges

2003-11-19 16:34:29
If we do this, it should be WE (the IETF engineers) that do it and NOT
another thing we request the secretariat to do. We should eat our own
dogfood by writing, testing and then GIVING an implementation that is
compatible with the current label making system to the secretariat.

It's probably not too hard to do, given how the pre-reg badges are
produced (I am guessing), but may be much harder for the on-site badges
that are made using those little thermal printers.

From experience I can tell you that even adding the 3 extra characters we
have in Scandinavian can cause all sorts of interesting problems when
mixed with different output equipment. Add multi-byte characters and you
may see line-printers shutting down and opening their lids indicating
"paper out" or generating spurious form-feeds. OK, so we don't use
line printers any more, but you get the idea :-) [If anyone still
remembers how to make a line printer attached to an IBM 370 do this by
sending just the right sort of code, you get extra points].

The good news is that modern operating systems (ahem) tend to have Unicode
and other nice support built-in, but this doesn't necessarily mean that
output is a breeze.

Ole


Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   GSM: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: ole(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj

<control>-L here:


On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, John C Klensin wrote:

--On Wednesday, November 19, 2003 11:15 -0800 Fred Baker
<fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:

At 08:23 AM 11/19/2003, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
Proposals for making email addresses fully internationalized
were a hot  topic in Minneapolis. I'd like to suggest a more
modest reform: fully  internationalized IETF name badges.
IETF 59 might be a fine venue for  rolling those out...

No problem, as long as nobody expects anyone in particular to
actually be able to *read* the name badges. I don't read Han
(simplified or traditional), Korean, Kanji, Cyrillic, Arab
(either alphabet) or a variety of other alphabets. I manage
with umlauts and such, because I can make a noise and the
other person can say "yes, that's me, the way you pronounce my
name is...". But I have no clue how to start in a
non-ascii-like alphabet, and frankly with tonal languages such
as Chinese my western mouth is likely to injure the person's
name trying to get it out.

Aside: I had a Taiwanese employee once who would periodically
give me lessons on how to say her name. It sounded to *me*
like I was pronouncing it her way. One can only wonder what
she was hearing...

Just speaking for myself, one of the things I really like
about name badges is being able to determine, upon inspection,
what to call the person standing in front of me.

BTW, while I understand that many Asians can read each other's
writing, I don't think that implies they can read Cyrillic or
Arab either. They're in a similar boat, if not the same one.

What I would suggest, if we do this, is writing the person's
name *twice*: once in their native character set, and once in
a form that an english-reader can read. The latter is an
established interchange architecture.

Fred, this is exactly what I was suggesting, only partially in
jest.  Native character set, plus punycode, which is much more
precise than a transliteration.  If we don't like the punycode
form,  we probably need to think about what we are doing to
users in the absence of a serious presentation layer.

     john





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