Re: a few short notes

On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 01:28:40PM +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> You mean apart from the facts that it's most widely understood by 
> people, the most widely implemented in computers, and all 
> internet-relevant standards that use text rely on it?

You mean, you and all your friends understand it, the computers you own
understand it, and the S-centric IETF write standards with it. There are
more people in the world who understand Chinese than understand English. 
Computers do not understand English anyway (and most modern operating 
systems have full Unicode support), and the standards can be translated into 
any language (and should be).

So, if this was the Chinese inventing a system, are you xenophobic enough to 
not be bothered that they don't let you understand it?

The fact that standards must be produced in English, is in my opinion a 
flawed aspect of the process. We should be taking an international view of 
this and taking lessons from the UN in respect to translation into the 
languages over 90% of the world's population understands: English, French, 
Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.

Internationalisation is not going to go away just because you don't like it.
 
-- 
Paul Robinson