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.
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Graham Klyne
([EMAIL PROTECTED])
