Re: URL internationalization!

At 19:31 97-02-19 JST, Masataka Ohta wrote:
>> No, I didn't say so. What I said is that the practice of using
>> characters besides ASCII without a specification of how the
>> server will interpret them is not guaranteed to work. In the
>> case of Canada, it will work in many cases because iso-8859-1
>> is well established there in the context of the web. However,
>> it will not work worldwide.
>
>The moral of the story is that interEuropeanization is not
>internationalization.

The moral of the story is that we ought to use a worlwide character set
where even Japanese characters are integrity-preserved everywhere! Any
language can be used internationally, not only English. We should not detour
the issue. The net result to use ASCII worldwide plus a local character set
only on a cultural island would be that English would dominate everywhere
and other languages at a major disadvantage. This is not what I call
internationalization, that is insularization.

The main moral of the story is that ASCII is not the solution!

Alain LaBonté
Québec