Re: URL internationalization!

Masataka,

On Wed, 19 Feb 1997, you wrote:

> The discussion that the Internetionalized URL is the ASCII-only
> URL has already finished a few years ago.

In the sense that in the "canonical form" of an URL, only
ASCII is allowed, my current proposal doesn't change this.


> You have raised no now point.

No, internationalization of URLs as such is indeed not a new
point. But proper internationalization of URLs is a new point.

In terms of encoding (from characters to octets), chaos is the
current state, and this is unsatisfactory and can be improved.

In terms of how to do it, for about the past year, there have
been many discussions in particular about UTF-7 or UTF-8. It
turned out that UTF-8 is the better solution, consistent with
much other work going on on in the IETF.

In terms of keyboarding, the claim that only an extremely limited
character set would be acceptable was long held up by many
people. Because it's easy to offer a keyboarding service with
an HTML page (in particular with a Java applet), because it
is unfair and highly inefficient that local users would have
to convert their resource names to strange %HH sequences,
and because we always have the "canonical form" as a fallback,
this claim has lost its importance.

Another claim made many times by opponents to URL internationalization
was that domain names couldn't be internationalized anyway. With my
draft-duerst-dns-i18n-00.txt, I showed that it could indeed be done
very easily.


All the above, and some other arguments, have lead to the conclusion
that something can and has to be done about URL internationalization.


> those of us
> who have know that we don't need URL human readable unless it
> is keyboarded, transcribed or mailed.

To these three points, which you probably see mainly for "entry
point" URLs, add display of URLs of links in the browser, and
use of URLs by authors when writing their pages.

I'm glad to see that you admit the need for human readable URLs.
Because many people in the world are not familliar with the Latin
alphabet, or at least not with words in languages they understand
being written with the Latin alphabet, I conclude that you are
in favor of URL internationalization.

If you have ideas for improvements over my proposal, or other,
better ways to achieve URL internationalization, we will all
be glad to listen.


Regards,	Martin.