Well, I think there is a problem that may border on
understanding, and it is tied up with my major personal
objection to the general style of the work that has come out of
the WG.
Dear John & All,
I have followed this group with interest and often mystification. It
appears that members of the group have widely different understandings of
the scope and objective. The multi-lingual and cross-cultural aspects have
exacerbated this situation.
(I do not blame or criticise the IDN group - it's not their fault if the
initial question is wrong, and they were asked to look at a narrow
technical aspect of a much wider problem.)
My "view from the hill" is that overall we want to get to a position where
the Internet can be comfortably and reliably used by the users of different
character sets and languages.
That simply expressed goal is a long way off, but we have at our disposal a
set of possible technologies and protocols. It seems to me that IDN has
been a process of trying to rationalise these with the character sets and
produce a single, fully inter-operable answer.
I think we need an additional process - a plan for evolving
internationalization over an extended period. There is however a need for
some visible progress here because the current hegemony of the English
language and character set is divisive.
Firstly, I believe we should examine a process that deploys quickly the
fullest possible range of 8-bit ascii characters.
Many of these, especially accented characters, were sidelined by us Anglos
or unnecessarily hi-jacked by operating systems (especially by Unix). This
is a quick fix, but will give great benefits to the populations of Western
Europe, South America, much of Africa and ex-colonies of Western
"Imperialist" nations in general.
Even this short-term action will cause considerable pain and is not
immediate, requiring work on emailers, proxies and some databases etc. It
is in my judgement a worthwhile action which does not detrimentally impact
the wider problem.
(I am sure someone will point out that this won't work because the Swedish
"Foo" maps to the Lithuanian "Bar" but this is mere sophistry because these
sort of confusions exist already between and within many character sets and
languages and we humans cope with them - we have to.)
Secondly we need to start a process which ends up with the deployment of a
Unicode-like system across all Internet addressing systems. This is the
nearest thing to the work of the current IDN group. I believe it is a
mammoth task that will require phasing. It may also suffer from
considerable political interference.
Thirdly, and most importantly we need to address how the Internet is used
by the users. A Korean who speaks only Korean and types only Korean wants
answers in Korean. This simplifies the IDN problem (for a uni-lingual
Korean) hugely. What he requires is not necessarily a fully-functional
internationalised DNS that he can access directly. He needs a very clever
search engine which understands his linguistic abilities and the languages
in which web-sites, files etc are written.
We probably need a new generation of search engines which lie above and
alongside DNS. They can drive the DNS system, (extended or not) as the
addressing system it was always meant to be and can handle many of the
"linguistic intersect" problems locally where they can be addressed, and
where they are not so significant.
A more user-oriented approach may give a less universal but more
implementable solution and make the Internet available to billions. The
alternative may be that they start to set up alternative language
Internets. This may be politically attractive to some régimes but damaging
to our vision of a universal Internet.