Re: [idn] Document Status?

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

At 08:53 02/09/01 -0400, vinton g. cerf wrote:
> One working definition of internationalization is that the 
> encoding/expression is "understood" by speakers of all languages. There is 
> global agreement, I believe, that block Latin characters can be used by 
> anyone in any country to express the name of a destination country in a 
> postal address. So for example "UNITED STATES" or "FRANCE" or "AUSTRALIA", 
> "JAPAN", "VIETNAM" are all considered acceptable in every country. This 
> agreement allows, for example, that the destination address, except for 
> the name of the country, can be rendered in a language local to the target 
> country and does not have to be understood by the postal service in the 
> originating country. Consequently, someone sending a letter from the US to 
> a recipient in Vietnam can write the destination address in Vietnamese and 
> the US postal service need only understand the characters "VIETNAM" at the 
> bottom of the destination address.
Some comments:

- 'Internationalization', in the context of software, means the basic
  work that is needed to use different scripts, languages,...
  James and John already explained that.

- For postal addresses, strictly speaking, you are guaranteed delivery
  from any country if you use the French contry name. English may also
  work pretty well in practice, but I'm not sure it's guaranteed.

> Concerns about how cut/paste will work are germane to the discussion about 
> the utility of IDNs because such actions may be the ONLY way in which 
> someone may be able to enter special character strings into text intended 
> to represent an IDN. Something like this happens to me regularly as I 
> compose email to friends whose names involve the use of characters with 
> various accent markings. Since I don't know how to enter these from my 
> simple ASCII keyboard, I usually end up cutting and pasting the 
> characters. This works because the text of email is permitted to be pretty 
> general in its encoding. I don't know how that would work out if I were 
> dealing with non-Latin character sets. I know I would need special 
> software to render Hangul or Kanji, for instance, but I assume that the 
> rendering packages also serve to make highlighting and cut/paste work.
Seeing that you use:
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1.1
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
References: <5.1.0.14.0.20020831142253.03198200@mail.jefsey.com>
 <5.1.1.2.2.20020830092156.042c6600@jay.songbird.com>
 <3CD14E451751BD42BA48AAA50B07BAD60336FDA3@vsvapostal3.prod.netsol.com>
 <5.1.1.2.2.20020830092156.042c6600@jay.songbird.com>
 <5.1.1.2.2.20020830110236.0260f0b0@jay.songbird.com>
 <01cd01c25096$b6845ec0$8e00a8c0@JAMESSONYVAIO> <3609004.1030770370@localhost>
 <5.1.0.14.0.20020831142253.03198200@mail.jefsey.com>

I understand why you are a bit sceptical about cut/paste.

The Windows version of Eudora is well known for it's lack
of support for Unicode. The English version does Latin-1,
and the Japanese version I use does iso-2022-jp, but nothing
more. I hope that Eudora for Windows will finally be upgraded
to decent Unicode support when they do IDN. The Mac version
of Eudora is different, no problem with Unicode at all.

On newer versions of Windows (as well as other OSes), cut/paste
of any Unicode text isn't really a problem at all if the
application does the right thing.


Regards,   Martin.