Subject: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 08:03:12 +0000

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.

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 09:33:30 -0800

you may want to look at the work going on in the idn wg.

randy

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 03:02:43 +0859 ()

Graham;

> affect cross-character-type-boundary Internet activities.

Nothing.

Cross-character-type-boundary is a pure localization issue
and has nothing to do with people wrongly working on I18N.

> efforts to internationalize protocols;

If only you understand what "internationalize protocols" mean.

ASCII (latin, numeric and hypen) characters are the only characters
internationally recognizable by so many people.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 13:40:30 -0500

At 03:03 03/12/00, Graham Klyne wrote:
>I guess one of the first questions should be;  "Is some partitioning of the Internet community such a bad thing?"

        A partioning based on nationality, which is of course
different than language group, would be harmful.  Lack of
interoperability of standard protocols would be bad, for
whatever reason, including incompatible localisations.  Lack
of standards support for internationalisation/multi-lingual
computing, as different from localisation, would also be bad.

>  Why should it matter if, say, Chinese-based domains aimed 
>at Chinese audiences are not meaningfully accessible to 
>non-Chinese Internet users?  

        What about people who can read and perhaps also write
in Chinese characters but who are not Chinese (either ROC
on Taiwan or PRC on the mainland) nationals ?  Consider
not only folks in Singapore or SE Asia generally, but also 
Chinese-capable folks in other places (e.g. North America, 
Europe).  [NB: I'm deliberately ignoring the issues with 
Traditional vs Simplified characters just now, though that
is also part of the internationalisation equation].  

        I regularly read my news from British or Hong Kong
or other countries' web sites.  Living in North America,
I'm certainly not the target audience for the HK Standard
or South China Morning Post.  However, I do read those 
newspapers online.  Less regularly, but occasionally,
I do read Chinese web sites (in Chinese) or Japanese web
sites (reading the Kanji portion only).  I am most assuredly 
NOT the target audience for any of these web sites.

        On a daily basis, I receive mail with Chinese language
contents, though a surprising amount of that turns out to
be unsolicted bulk email in my own case.  I receive a modest
amount of German or Vietnamese email.  So multi-lingual protocol
capabilities are quite important to me.

        So for all those reasons, it does in fact matter
a great deal.

>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.

        I do think so.

>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.

        I don't want to try to predict the future, so I won't.  
I can say that today, we are NOT anywhere close to a reasonable 
end point or stopping point for internationalisation of IETF 
standards-track protocols.  In particular, we haven't resolved
the basic internationalisation issues for a number of core 
infrastructure protocols (e.g. DNS).

Regards,

Ran
[email-masked]

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 13:57:10 -0500

At 08:03 AM 12/3/00 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>I guess one of the first questions should be;  "Is some partitioning of 
>the Internet community such a bad thing?".

Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to make a phone call to anywhere 
in the world?

Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to postal mail a letter or 
package to anywhere in the world?

d/

ps.  strictly rhetorical questions, as I hope is obvious.

=-=-=-=-=
Dave Crocker  <[email-masked]>
Brandenburg Consulting  <www.brandenburg.com>
Tel: +1.408.246.8253,  Fax: +1.408.273.6464

---

From: vint cerf <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 13:17:45 -0500

In my opinion, it is vital to craft Internet's evolution so as to maintain
full connectivity and interworking among all its parts. I do not see
"balkanization" as a good thing at all. I believe there are sound technical
means to achieve the objective of incorporating character sets associated
with non-roman languages but that critics need to understand more fully just
how important the limitations of the current character set for domain names
have been in maintaining interworking and also ability of so many applications
to incorporate and refer to domain names. The IA4 alphabet includes essentially
just the letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and the "-" (dash). This is the limit of what
is allowed in domain names today. 

Incorporating other character sets without deep technical consideration will
risk the inestimable value of interworking across the Internet. It CAN be done
but there is a great deal of work to make it function properly.

Vint

At 08:03 AM 12/3/2000 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>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
>

---

From: Karl Auerbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 11:42:02 -0800 (PST)

> accessible to non-Chinese Internet users?

There's a distinct issue that exists apart from the inter-human aspects -
the packets containing these new character forms will flow, at least
occasionally, into pretty much everyone's machines, routers, NATs,
firewalls, web caches, etc - all of which need to be able to handle these
new packets without ill effects.  (The definition of "ill effect" will
vary depending on what the box is supposed to be doing.)

For instance, it would be "a bad thing" if some "transparent" web cache in
some ISP went south when it re-resolved a URL that contained a domain name
that either had itself a label in some non-hostname character set or was
resolved via a CNAME containing non-hostname characters.

In other words, although the humans (and their user interfaces) may
Balkanize, the infrastructure on which the net operates should not.

		--karl--

---

From: Betsy Brennan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 15:06:10 -0500

But the Internet is not the postal system nor the phone system. We already
have the postal system and the phone system.  They may be slower, but does
that mean they should be replaced or that the Internet must duplicate what
these systems do? BLB

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 12:29:04 -0800

> these systems do?

i am sorry, but i can not understand the above.  perhaps you were writing in
californian.  qed.

randy

---

From: "Kimon A. Andreou" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 15:30:37 -0500

But isn't the Internet a medium of communication as is the Post and the
telephone?
Therefore, shouldn't it support communication between any two points,
wherever they may be or however they're called?

Kimon

----- Original Message -----
From: "Betsy Brennan" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2000 15:06
Subject: Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

> that mean they should be replaced or that the Internet must duplicate what

____________NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_________
Download Now     http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html
Request a CDROM  1-800-333-3633
___________________________________________________________

---

From: "R . P . Aditya" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 13:20:37 -0800

As has been noted, the _hard part_ is making the protocol that is used between
countries' communications systems "language independent".

> > Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to make a phone call to anywhere

I have yet to see a telephone dialpad that even has non-arabic base-10 numbers
on it (has it slowed the spread and use of the phone system?).

> > package to anywhere in the world?

You can't address a letter to someone in Berkeley, USA in nagari or amharic
characters and expect it to reach. However you can address a letter to someone
in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in ASCII characters with a poor-phonetic
approximation and expect it to reach (choice of locales based on experience).

At some point it's not worth the effort to "internationalize" all the
layers...will the lucrative returns on additional domains pay for such an
effort? and will that make an already "complex" Internet more accessible?

Does Babelization without language isomorphism lead to Balkanization? Or, "why
is machine translation so hard?".

Adi

---

From: "Kimon A. Andreou" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 16:56:38 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: "R . P . Aditya" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2000 16:20
Subject: Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

<snip>
> approximation and expect it to reach (choice of locales based on
experience).
<snip>
> Adi

But don't packets get routed using IP addresses  (i.e. numbers) ?

Kimon

_______________________________________________
Why pay for something you could get for free?
NetZero provides FREE Internet Access and Email
http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 17:15:59 -0500

Kimon gets a A.  Betsy gets an F.

d/

At 03:30 PM 12/3/00 -0500, Kimon A. Andreou wrote:
> > have the postal system and the phone system.  T

=-=-=-=-=

---

From: lists <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 16:00:53 -0800

> But don't packets get routed using IP addresses  (i.e. numbers) ?

er, wrong layer. Although I'm as good at remembering IP addresses as phone
numbers, you'll have a hard time convincing others to give up DNS.

"I'm sorry, I'm not going to be able to figure out how to type that email
address on my keyboard, could you please send me a message, and I'll just hit
reply".

Adi

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 16:14:07 -0800

> address on my keyboard, could you please send me a message, and I'll just hit

if the app-presentation -> internal coding -> dns request mapping is not
one:one and reversable on the other end, even this is not sure to work.

randy

---

From: "Kimon A. Andreou" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 19:54:24 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: "lists" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2000 19:00
Subject: Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

> address on my keyboard, could you please send me a message, and I'll just
hit

Good point.

I didn't think about e-mail addresses.

Kimon

_____NetZero Free Internet Access and Email______
   http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 17:33:48 +0900

At 00/12/03 08:03 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>Leaving aside the issues of competing registries,

Sorry, but I think that's the main topic of the article (as far
as I can deduce from the abstract), and it is also the main
threat to create balkanization. The problem currently is not
that Chinese domain names may create a disconnect between
the "Chinese Internet" and some other part of the Internet,
but that there are various proposals and actors that are
working on Chinese domain names, and that all of them act
prematurely (i.e. before there is an IETF spec) and with
side interests that affect things negatively.

>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.
>
>the Internet community such a bad thing?".  Why should it matter if, say, 

Reasonable question indeed. If the content is Chinese, does it hurt if the
address is also Chinese? There are cases where it indeed hurts (such as when
you have fonts to display Chinese on your system, but nothing to input
Chinese, as may be the case if you work off an English OS of some kind).
However, in general and for the majority of actual users (i.e. for
the Chinese users reading Chinese web pages,...), having Chinese
domain names is actually a big advantage. They are easier to
memorize, easier to guess, easier to identify with, and so on.

>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.

At the *linguistic* level, there are certain rather hard boundaries
based on the difficulty of learning foreign languages and on the
slow advances of machine translation. At the social level, boundaries
should be kept as low as possible.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 17:20:35 +0900

>package to anywhere in the world?

Of course it would be very bad. But it is usual now to send mail
e.g. from Japan to Japan with an address without any Latin letters.
It is also possible to send mail e.g. from the US or Europe to e.g.
Japan, with all but the country name in ideographs.

So the postal system is already now much closer to multilingual
domain names than to ASCII-only domain names.

It is also possible, as far as I understand, to send mail
with an address only written in Latin letters, to any country
in the world. The multilingual domain name solution should of
course provide a way (at least one way) to do this.

Please also note that Japanese name cards usually have two sides,
one in Japanese and one in Latin. Now, the email addresses on
both sides are the same, but in the future, you would just
use the one on the Latin side if you cannot type Japanese.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 08:15:42 -0500

Thank you.  I was hoping someone would point out the support for parallel 
operation so we could go further down that path.  As you note, it seems to 
be the closest to providing local/global support already.

That means postal gives us:

1. Global support for a common "character set"

2. Global support for a carefully mixed character set -- though really it 
is just a partitioning between the global field and the local field

3. Local support for a local character set.

(the support goes beyond character set, but let's leave it at that if 
that's ok.)

An immediate problem with comparing to postal is that it somewhat 
correlates with the path a letter will take, so that the incremental 
interpretation can be done by groups with different language 
skill-sets.  The DNS does not have that flexibility and the domain name 
interpretation is not part of the transfer sequence of the data.

Schemes that put an ACE-like field into a .com might be considered to be 
like #2, above, by really they are not.  The whole string is still global.

Frankly this leaves me viewing the postal example as pretty unhelpful for 
finding a solution to the DNS requirement.

On the other hand, this thread was triggered by Graham's question about the 
negative impact of partitioning.  The postal example would seem to show 
that the effect is not so bad.

Except I would claim that it is not partitioning.  Note that an address 
always has a global representation, in addition to a possibly different 
local one.

Perhaps that can reconciled as easily as claiming that any 'local' domain 
name must also have a global form? (But, somehow, the word "scaling" gets 
in the way of believing that.)

d/

=-=-=-=-=

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 22:59:33 +0859 ()

Dave;

> be the closest to providing local/global support already.

Silly comparison.

Efficient postal system works with numbers so called zip code.

Postal address with various characters needs human intervention for
complex matching and is similar not to DNS but to search engines.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 09:17:54 -0500

> > be the closest to providing local/global support already.

Thank you.  We always seek to entertain.

>Efficient postal system works with numbers so called zip code.

Zip/postal code is not required.

The example given was of country string in 'global' form and remainder in 
local.

>complex matching and is similar not to DNS but to search engines.

Machines frequently process the strings, but that is not relevant to the 
nature and use of the strings.

They are addresses, pertaining to location.  Search engines are for 
free-form keywords.  Not the same at all.

d/

=-=-=-=-=

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 10:07:22 -0500

> address on my keyboard, could you please send me a message, and I'll just hit

Wasn't there a Dilbert cartoon regarding sending a page to a pager number
containing a caret? ;)
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 04 Dec 2000 10:15:20 -0500

> is allowed in domain names today. 

The sad part is, of course, that RFC1035, section 3.1 specifically says
that any octet value is legal.

But I guess we're stuck with the IA4 charset.... ;(

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2000 18:23:06 +0000 (GMT)

> that any octet value is legal.

many octet values are legal... in IPv4 dot quads. And unicode
characters are sixteen-bit instead of sensibly having escape
sequences...

How far could a suitably translated http://<unicode char><unicode
char>/ take you? You can get a lot across in two chinese ideograms,
say. IPv6 raises the string length to eight chars. If eight chars
is good enough for DOS, it's good enough for billions of Chinese DOS
users.

Demand for suitable character space for your name in your language
might finally make geographic addressing take off, too. It's the
equivalent of 0800-WHO-NEEDS-DNS.

L.

> But I guess we're stuck with the IA4 charset.... ;(

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://131.227.76.21/Personal/L.Wood/>

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 18:05:25 +0900

At 00/12/04 08:15 -0500, Dave Crocker wrote:

>interpretation can be done by groups with different language skill-sets.

Really big post offices have special places to handle things such
as incomplete addresses. Nothing guaranteed, but if you are lucky,
you may even successfully send a letter from an arbitrary place to
anywhere in the world using local addressing, at least if you don't
forget the country name in the local script.

>The DNS does not have that flexibility and the domain name interpretation 
>is not part of the transfer sequence of the data.

Yes, there are quite some differences. The advantage we have is
that as soon as the characters are somehow in the computer,
everything else is mechanical. This means there is no need
for a global field; if somebody is able to type in the address,
that's it, the machine does the rest.

>like #2, above, by really they are not.  The whole string is still global.

ACE is (maybe) for machines. It's not primarily intended for humans.
We may have ACE all the way (including TLD). It might be usable as a
poor man's ASCII equivalent, but I strongly doubt that anybody will
want to have it on the Latin side of their name card.

>finding a solution to the DNS requirement.

Well, the postal example shows how Latin and other scripts can
both be used to address something. The mixed case is not too
important for us, as discussed above.

In the postal example, conversion from one notation to the other
is a complex process (in particular for Japanese, lookup in context
is absolutely necessary). So I don't expect that something purely
mechanical (e.g. ACE) will do for DNS.

>On the other hand, this thread was triggered by Graham's question about 
>the negative impact of partitioning.  The postal example would seem to 
>show that the effect is not so bad.

>always has a global representation, in addition to a possibly different 

It's a kind of partitioning, in that it is not always easy,
for everybody, to do use the 'local' address or to convert
from a local to a global one.

>in the way of believing that.)

Scaling would be only by a factor 2.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 07:16:24 -0800

> forget the country name in the local script.

tagging, eh?

---

From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 10:55:13 -0500

"Martin J. Duerst" wrote:

> The mixed case is not too

I think it can be, actually.  Suppose you've got someone living in Spain,
whose father is Spanish and whose mother is Japanese.  His full surname, then,
is something like Ohta y Montoya (or maybe the other way around; I don't
remember).  Now he wants to get a vanity domain, with "Ohta" in Japanese
characters and "y Montoya" in Roman letters.  He needs to be able to mix
character sets.

--
/===============================================================\
|John Stracke    | http://www.ecal.com |My opinions are my own. |
|Chief Scientist |==============================================|
|eCal Corp.      |"Fate just isn't what it used to be." --Hobbes|
[email-masked]|                                              |
\===============================================================/

---

From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 07:42:12 -0800

>want to have it on the Latin side of their name card.

I would, because I know that people in many parts of the world don't 
know how to enter "sömos" on their keyboard, and if I register the 
domain "snömos.se", I really want people to be able to get to

   http://www.snömos.se

so, if I think it is perfectly alright to have

   http://www.bq--abzw55tnn5zq.se

on my buissnes card (aswell).

    paf

--

---

From: [email-masked] (Claus Färber)
Date: 05 Dec 2000 15:37:00 +0100

vint cerf <[email-masked]> schrieb/wrote:
> Incorporating other character sets without deep technical
> consideration will risk the inestimable value of interworking across
> the Internet. It CAN be done but there is a great deal of work to make
> it function properly.

How do I type chinese characters? I can't. So I can't write mail to  
someone whose email address contains non-ASCII characters if I don't  
already have the address in electronic form (e.g. within a webpage).

It's worth nothing that my computer could handle the address if I can't.

Claus

-- 
http://www.faerber.muc.de

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 19:32:45 +0859 ()

Claus;

> already have the address in electronic form (e.g. within a webpage).

Right.

And, if a mailto URL is within a webpage with a chinese character
anchor, it does not matter whether a mail address in the URL
consists of pure ASCII characters or not.

> It's worth nothing that my computer could handle the address if I can't.

You properly understand that the current ASCII DNS is already
fully internationalized.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: vint cerf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 08:19:14 -0500

Mr. Ohta has put his finger on a key point: ability of all
parties to generate email addresses, web page URLs and so on.
Even if we introduce extended character sets, it seems vital
that there be some form of domain name that can be rendered
(and entered) as simple IA4 characters to assure continued
interworking at the most basic levels. This suggests that
there is need for some correspondence between an IA4 Domain
Name and any extended characterset counterpart.

Vint

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 11:45:35 -0500

(Can we please move this discussion to the IDN list, where it
belongs?)

> Name and any extended characterset counterpart.

Vint,

I think I agree with the principle.  However, there are several
different models with which the "correspondence" can be
implemented.  The difference among them is quite important
technically --implementations would need to occur in different
places and with different implications, deployment times, and
side effects--  and perhaps as important philosophically.  E.g.,
let me try to identify some of the in extreme form to help
identify the differences:

(i) The names in the DNS are "protocol elements".  They should
be expressed in a minimal subset of ASCII so that they can be
rendered and typed on almost all of the world's equipment (the
assumption that, e.g., all Chinese or Arabic keyboards and
display devices in the medium to long term will contain Roman
characters seems a little dubious).  There is no requirement
that they be mneumonic in any language: in principle, a string
containing characters selected at random would do as well as the
name of a company, person, or product.

This model gives rise to directory and keyword systems (most of
them outside the DNS) that contain the names that people use.
While the registration and name-conflict problems are
non-trivial, names in multiple languages and character codings
can easily map onto a single DNS identifier.  On the other hand,
binding a national-language name to an ASCII name would need to
be done either by parallel registrations or by matching on
keywords (and the latter might not yield unambiguous and
accurate results).

(ii) Entries in the DNS are always coded.  After all, "ASCII" is
just a code mapping between a human-visible character set and a
machine (or wire) representation.  It is the job of an
application to get from "characters" to "codes" and back, and to
recognize coding systems and applying the correct decodings.
And software that is old or broken will simply display a
different rendering of the coded form (whether that is a
"hexification" such as Base64 or some other system).  

This model gives rise to the "ACE all the way up" models, in
which non-ASCII names are placed in the DNS using some tagging
system, but the "ASCII representation" of a name that, in the
original, uses non-Roman characters, may be quite ugly and bear
no connection with the name as it would be rendered using the
original characters other than an algorithmic one.   It also
gives rise to some of the UTF-8 models, on the assumption that
applications that can't handle the full IS 10646 character set
can do something intelligent.

(iii) Regardless of how the names in the DNS are coded, it is
important to have analogies to "two sided business cards".  Such
systems assume that any name rendered in a non-Roman character
set should have an analogue in Roman characters.  And those
analogues are expected to be bound to the original form by
transliteration or translation -- they aren't just random,
algorithmically matching, strings.

While there need to be facilities for the non-Roman (even
non-ASCII) characters in either the DNS or a directory,
establishing the "ASCII names" is, of necessity, a registration
issue rather than an algorithmic issue.  We don't know how to do
the "translation" (or, in the general case, even
transliteration) algorithmically.   To give one example, despite
the "Han unification" of IS 10646, the characters on a Japanese
business card for you would almost certainly be different from
those on a Chinese business card for you.    And, because of the
registration issue, there is no plausible way to impose a
requirement that every host (or other DNS entry) have a name in
ASCII if it has a name in some other script: people and hosts
not visible outside their own countries may not care enough to
go to the trouble.

These models are not mutually exclusive.  But they are
definitely different perspectives.

It is also worth noting that, as a matter of perspective, the
dominance of subsets of ASCII in these debates has some
important technical advantages (e.g., the code set can be made
very small and the canonicalization/matching rules are
algorithmic, universally-agreed, and trivial), but it is also
significantly an historical accident.  Because of that
historical accident, we tend to couch these discussions (as your
note does and as I have done above) in terms of ASCII <->
something-else mappings.  But it isn't hard to imagine a
business card containing Thai and Chinese, or Vietnamese and
Sanscrit, or Hebrew and Arabic.  It would be interesting, but
impractical in the extreme, to try to insist that all DNS names
be renderable in all languages and the associated character
repertoires (and more impractical if we insisted that the
renderings have "meaning").  But I think we need to remember
that limiting case as we try to figure out what should be done
here.

      john

---

From: "Hongwei" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2000 17:39:30 -0000

I can't agree more.

-----Original Message-----
From: John C Klensin [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: 06 December 2000 16:46
To: vint cerf
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Will Language Wars Balkanize the Web?

Vint,

      john

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 06:03:51 +0859 ()

John;

> (Can we please move this discussion to the IDN list, where it

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. So, the
only reasonable reaction is to ignore it (I dropped improper CC:).

The only necessary discussion on domain names, IF ANY, is
localization issues, for which there is no specific WG of IETF.

> important to have analogies to "two sided business cards".

A typical business card of Japanese have Chinese characters.

When we internatinalize it, we use the other side to put a Lain
character version.

As we already have fully internatinalized DNS with Latin
characters, Chinese characters in DNS is localization against
internationalization.

> And, because of the

That are local issues.

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.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 07:41:00 -0500

>that mean they should be replaced or that the Internet must duplicate what

you missed it. Suppose you could not exchange in commerce with a person of 
a given nationality, not because you did not have a language in common with 
him or her, but because your system could not interpret his or her name. 
That would mean that you could not spend money in that person's direction, 
because you could not communicate with him or her. Although IP datagrams 
could get from you to him/her, there would not be a good way to determine 
what address to send them to. That would be pretty tough.

---

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 18:21:09 +0000

>always has a global representation, in addition to a possibly different 

You're right, it's not strictly partitioning...

>in the way of believing that.)

... when I asked that question, I had in mind something like Tim Berners 
Lee presented about at the WWW5 conference in 1996, in which connectivity 
between communities might be seen as having a fractal structure, with 
groupings and lines of communication between groups visible at a range of 
scales.  I think this is, in part, how people achieve flexible scalability 
in their communications.  (Similar patterns also arise in natural phenomena).

#g
--

BTW, the basic tenet of end-to-end connectivity of data and services is, I 
think, satisfied by the IP layer.  Part of my question was about the extent 
to which this end-to-end-ness needs to be duplicated at higher layers.

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

---

From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 14:56:17 +0000 (GMT)

On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Fred Baker wrote:

> because you could not communicate with him or her.

And it means that person is at a disadvantage in your marketspace, and
that it's not your problem.

(Which is why e.g. Andy Grove of Intel changed his name from something
Hungarian to Andy Grove. Why engineer complex technical solutions to
problems that market forces can easily take care of for you?)

L.

is getting a lot of Chinese spam with a Mime-Version: header and
no other mime content identification. Misused mime is worse than
useless.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 12:24:14 -0500

> that it's not your problem.

why in the world do people think they can justify or not justify actions
based on whether something is an advantage/disadvantage in some 
"marketspace"?

Keith

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 2000 03:49:46 +0859 ()

Keith;

> based on whether something is an advantage/disadvantage in some 

They can justify them locally within local marketspaces, of course.

However, they can't justify to call them internationalization.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 18:37:10 -0500

At 06:21 PM 12/6/00 +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>think, satisfied by the IP layer.  Part of my question was about the 
>extent to which this end-to-end-ness needs to be duplicated at higher layers.

Not sure whether this is a distraction -- hence the modified Subject -- but 
I do NOT consider an end-to-end mechanism at one level to be sufficient, 
when talking about end-to-end at another level.

Lower layers must support the e2e requirements of the layer under 
discussion, but those lower layers do not satisfy the requirements by 
themselves.

If the layer under discussion, in this case the DNS application, does not 
support e2e, then the fact that IP does does not buy much.

d/

=-=-=-=-=

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 2000 13:47:50 -0800

>However, they can't justify to call them internationalization.

precisely.