Subject: Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 15:35:00 -0700 (MST)

> From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>

> ...
> > (Can we please move this discussion to the IDN list, where it
> > belongs?)
>
> The point is that IDN WG is purposeless and is wrong to exist. Of
> course, it is waste of time to discuss it in IDN list....

Masataka Ohta is raising a point of order, and from what I've seen of
other "internationalization" efforts, it is probably more valid than
not.  That the IETF's effort nominally involves "internationalization"
instead of "localization" is bad sign.

Since I first encountered "internationalization" hassles in the late
1970's in making an ASCII+EBCDIC system behave tolerably for people
typing and reading Arabic and Hebrew text, I've found that
"internationalization" is both technically hard and incredibly Politically
Correct.  Some people like to hoist standardized flags that today bear
"Respect for Diversity" and start marching over cliffs--no, that's wrong.
In Politically Correct issues, the standards bearers tell everyone else
to march over the cliff while they stand to attention nearby.

Once an "internationalization" organization gets started, it *never*
stops, no matter how many of the original participants get wise
and quit, what obviously false premise is required to justify the
latest conclusion, nor what damage has already been done (not to
mention contemplated) in the product, standard, protocol, or whatever
justifies the existence of the internationalization organization.
"Is the new version equally and completley useless for both domestic
and overseas users?--Great, let's fix the next one."

It took me about 10 years and more than one "internationalization"
organization to reach that politically incorrect conclusion.

> ...
> If people want local names let them have them under local domains,
> with all the local conventions on encoding and everything.
>
> The administrator of the local domains may or may not force people
> have additional internatinalized domain names.
>
> Note that local, here, means culturally (not necessarily geographically)
> local that ccTLDs may or maynot be the local domains.
>
> But, it can be said that gTLDs are not a proper place to put local
> names.

The same thinking that says that MIME Version headers make sense in
general IETF list mail also says that localized alphabets and glyphs must
be used in absolutely all contexts, including those that everyone must
use and so would expect to be limited to the lowest common denominator.
When confronted with fact that ANSI X3.4 (ASCII) is a provincial U.S.
variant of an international standard, otherwise rational people flinch
and claim that sending anything but 7-bit ASCII to major IETF lists is
not merely an unthinking waste of bandwidth but must be supported and
encouraged.  They justify such nonsense with talk like:

]                                                diversity of list
] contributors' networking interests and experience (culture), which include
] people who happen to find it cost-effective to use such things as
] formatting and unusual character sets in their email. MIME is as much a
] part of the Internet culture as any standard 

(apologies to the author of that private message)

It is a mystery to me why otherwise reasonable people who would never
dream of imposing their own idiosyncracies on everyone else demand that
others not only be allowed but encouraged to do so.

In other words, people have trouble understanding that
"internationalization" necessarily means restricting to the lowest
common internatational denominatior instead of the impossible goal of
simultaneously supporting absolutely all possible languages and glyphs.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 08:45:17 +0100

>use and so would expect to be limited to the lowest common denominator.

it may have escaped the notice of some that a fair bit of the discussion on 
diacritcs was carried out using live examples, and while I am sure there 
were some who did not see the diacritics on screen, at least there was a 
single definition of how to get from what was sent on the wire to what 
might have been displayed on the screen, and MANY of the participants 
actually saw them correctly displayed.

MIME character sets is an example of a battle fought and won.

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, [email-masked]
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: [email-masked]