Re: URL internationalization!

Alain;

> The moral of the story is that we ought to use a worlwide character set
> where even Japanese characters are integrity-preserved everywhere!

It has nothing to do with URL internationalization.

We don't use worldwide characters on our international airline tickets.

> Any
> language can be used internationally, not only English.

The issue is not language, but script.

ASCII-only Latin script is perfectly fine as a formal notation of,
say, Japanese. For example, Japanese sentence "Doumo" in ASCII
means "Hi" in English.

> We should not detour
> the issue.

OK.

The current detouring attempt of Unicode/ISO 10646 on local script
support is that they are confusing people like you with no real
internationzalization expertise not to be able to distinguish
"language" and "script".

So, if you don't want to detour, never say "language-tag" when
what you need is "script-tag", which is MIME charset.

> 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.

Sure. That's exactly why Unicde/ISO 10646 is no good.

But, it has nothing to do with the attempt of URL localization.

> This is not what I call
> internationalization, that is insularization.

If you don't want to insulate yourself within ISO-8859-1 community,
don't use ISO-8859-1.

The more conservative you send, the more people can read it.

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

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

ASCII is not the solution of plain text internationalization to
support mixed multiple scripts, nor is ISO 10646.

But, it has nothing to do with the fact that localized URLs are
agaist internationalization.

							Masataka Ohta