Re: URL internationalization!

> > > What a fair attitude.
> > 
> > I agree that it is not completely fair. And if URLs were
> > just something inside the computer, we could say that it
> > is a user interface issue, have everybody use his/her
> > preferred way of displaying it, and ignore it in this
> > discussion.
> > 
> > However, URLs are also written on paper.
> 
> That's why URLs must be ASCII only.
> 

No, that is why we need a well defined way to map the character
written on paper to the encoding used to transmitt it electronically!

On paper used within my country a URL written as:

http://xxx.yy.zzz/innehåll.html

would be very meaningfull and possible to enter by keyboard without any
difficulty, while writing it as:

http://xxx.yy.zzz/%69%6e%6e%65%68%e5%6c%6c%2e%68%74%6d%6c

as I could do for those of you who cannot handle non ascii and Swedish
would be hopeless to remember and impossible to guess the meaning of,
BUT could be used by somebody that can only handle ascii.

If we have a well defined way to which code to represent each character
(including those that are non English) the non ascii URL above can
be entered by both a system that uses Mac-character set, MS Win code page
or ISO 8859-1 as their local character set, AND still be transmitted
with an encoding that can be handled by the receiver. Iso 10646 codes
would do fine.

    Dan