Subject: Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

From: Eric Brunner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 19:58:21 -0500

> 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. 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.

> PS:  I think it is without doubt that it is a Good Thing that we make 
> efforts to internationalize protocols ...

Even less satisfactory is the practice of generalizing ASCII (nee BCD) to
encodings with more than 256 code points, via this universalist scheme and
no other. To advance from ASCII to ASCII-plus-UTF8 could be just as well
characterized as SJIS/GB/Big5/... (and their uses) depricated.

>                                       ... my comments/questions are an 
> attempt to explore how far this process can reasonable go.

The i18n problem isn't trivial, and isn't advanced by  problematic essays,
good intentions, or American (actual and honorary) indulgences.

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).

As for poking the ICANN mess in the eye with a sharpened brush on the IETF
list prior to a meeting, it is clumsy slight-of-hand and a poor substitute
for work on writing system support.  See also the W3C WAI for information
encoding and presentation systems which are not "writing".

Kitakitamatsinopowaw,
Eric

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From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 17:10:59 +0900

At 00/12/04 19:58 -0500, Eric Brunner wrote:
>on the subject.

Any pointers?

>Arguably the universalist thesis understated the drawbacks

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.

>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.

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From: vint cerf <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 05:16:00 -0500

however the value of the public Internet is surely in its widespread
accessibility and interoperability.

vint