Re: URL internationalization!

Masataka Ohta <[email protected]> wrote:

>> >ASCII script is rich enough to denote French, Japanese, Thai,
>> >Arabic, Hindi...

ROTFLOL. ASCII dosn't work properly for English, never mind all those others.

>> How would you denote Arabic in ASCII?
>
>???
>
>> Arabic has more consonants than ASCII
>> has letters.
>
>So does English. Can you pronounce "th", "sh", "ch", "ng"...
>
>							Masataka Ohta

Can you pronounce "ghoti" in English orthography? Use "gh" as in "laugh",
"o" as in "women", and "ti" as in "nation". (Example due to George Bernard
Shaw)[1]

There is no standard for representing Arabic or any other non-Latin script
in English, much less in international ASCII. In 1972, I had occasion to go
into the problem of Latin-script renderings for Chinese pronunciation, and
found that the principal reference was a two-volume set made up of little
besides tables of the several hundred schemes in use. Volume One covered
systems used in English-language publications, such as Wade-Giles, Pinyin,
Yale, etc., and Volume Two was for systems used in other languages.

Anyway, this is a non-issue. Anyone who wishes to can use ASCII URLs, and
the question is whether and how to accommodate those who wish to use their
own scripts. I, as a user of English, fall into the second category. I want
to be able to use all of the letters that occur in English, not just the 26
we pretend are the full alphabet. As a programmer and mathematician, I want
to use APL and math characters. As a student of languages, religion, and
history, I want to use the full panoply of human writing systems. I am not
willing to be told that I have to invent or learn an ASCII transliteration
scheme for all of them. I am willing to let my computer translate from the
correct characters to a standardized ASCII encoding if it will allow
someone else's computer to translate back and render it as I intended.

I fail to understand the nature of Mr. Outa's objections to Unicode, other
than the fact that this is a strongly held belief. Since he states that all
opposing views are wrong without giving reasons, it is impossible to
discuss the issues with him.

Unicode is an international standard which offers significant advantages
over all the alternatives, notably that it is a single character set with
excellent round-trip conversion reliability, and standard methods for
rendering in 7 bits, 8 bits, or 16 bits. It also has the disadvantage that
it is not widely implemented, but that is changing rapidly.

The key issue is that regardless of anyone's preferences, Unicode is the
only international standard for handling multiple scripts that the major
software vendors are willing to implement and use as the basis for
internationalizing their operating systems and applications. Nobody else is
forced to follow them, but attempting to ignore them is futile. ISO-2022
will not be accepted as the basis of a future Internet standard in
preference to Unicode.

The questions before the House appear to be these:

(1) Should URLs include a standardized method of encoding multiple scripts?

(2) If so, should that be based on %hh coding of UTF-8 encoding of Unicode?

(3) Should alternative encodings, including national character sets and
ISO-2022, be allowed in addition to Unicode?

(4) If so, are we going to have to tag URIs with character set identifiers?

(5) Is it sufficiently obvious that the new standard will have to provide
for backward compatibility, and that browsers will be built, as they are
today, to handle many kinds of non-standard behavior?

(6) Is there any chance that we can abandon this pointless rwar?

(7) Should a future standard provide for native Unicode URLs?

I vote yes, yes, permitted but discouraged for future use, [sigh], don't be
silly, I hope so, and Hooray!

[1] Answer: The usual spelling is "fish". If I were allowed to use IPA here
and our software supported it, I could represent the pronunciation as well
as the spelling, but it doesn't and I can't. :(

--
Edward Cherlin  Ask. Someone knows.               [email protected]
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