Fwd: Re: internationalization of URIs

FYI.

>Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:18:41 +0900
>To: Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>, discuss@apps.ietf.org
>From: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
>Subject: Re: internationalization of URIs

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>Hello Thomas,
>
>I have some good news for you:
>
>For 'the rest of the URI', please have a look at RFC 3987
>Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)
>(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987).
>
>Work is currently going on to move this to Draft standard, please see:
>http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-duerst-iri-bis-01.txt
>
>Please review and send your comments to public-iri@w3.org.
>
>
>As for the "http:", that's indeed a piece that some might say is missing.
>Even the IRI spec still
>
>My current take on this is as follows:
>1) Only very few URI schemes are actually used widely, mostly only "http:"
>2) On most browsers, "http:" can be dropped
>3) Things like "http:" look like secret incantations or garbage
>   to most end users familiar with the Latin script, too
>   (that doesn't make it easier to type for people not familiar
>    with the Latin script, though)
>4) I think an easy way to help would be to provide a drop-down
>   menu at the start of the address/location field e.g. in a browser
>   or a Web page editor, with some of the following selections:
>
>   http (Web Page Address)
>   ftp (File Exchange)
>   mailto (Email Address)
>   ...
>   [of course the explanatory text being in the user interface language]
>
>5) Some browsers might automatically transscribe character sequences
>   in non-Latin scripts corresponding to things such as "http://" or
>   "ftp://" to Latin automatically when they appear at the start of
>   the browser address/location bar. So e.g. somebody in Greece
>   would type something like "φτπ://", and it would automatically
>   be converted to "ftp://".
>
>   [neither 4) nor 5) are currently implemented as far as I know,
>    but they wouldn't be rocket science, and they would be pretty
>    local, low-key solutions, and other, similar ideas, may also
>    come up]
>
>6) The next step would be to come up with some matching mechanism
>   (the easy part :-) and some political framework to create parallel
>   names for the schemes (the tough part :-(. I haven't looked at
>   the details, but it might be possible to reuse NAPTR RRs or
>   some such for the technical part. (that idea is due to James
>   Seng, in personal communication at the Kuala Lumpur ICANN
>   meeting in 2004).
>
>
>I'm sorry this is a bit browser-centric, but that's where I see
>most users use most URIs/IRIs.
>
>[Private rant: 1) and 2) together mean that non-ASCII TLDs are way
>more important than getting scheme names internationalized, despite
>of what some shy ICANN people might say ("we can't possibly move ahead
>with non-ASCII TLDs unless we have parallel versions of scheme names")
>or what some internationalization zealots might say ("everything
>or nothing")]
>
>
>Hope this helps.
>
>Regards,    Martin.
>
>At 04:39 07/10/16, Thomas Narten wrote:
>>As some of you may know, as part of testing the readiness of IDNs,
>>ICANN has inserted a set of internationalized versions of ".test" into
>>the root zone of the DNS. See
>>http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-15oct07.htm for
>>details.
>>
>>One of the questions that this has prompted (again) is what about that
>>pesky "http:", that still needs to typed in ascii. And what about the
>>rest of the URL for that matter.
>>
>>I know this is not a new issue, but could someone summarize the
>>landscape here on what "needs to be done" to internationalize the rest
>>of the URI (other than the DNS name)? Is this considered to be
>>completely an application issue? (I note that URIs are ascii, but
>>there are escaping mechanisms to handle other characters.)
>>
>>Is there additional IETF work that needs to be done here? Or does this
>>all fall under application-specific enablement?
>>
>>Or is even worse, in that this largely falls outside of applications
>>and more into what is typically done by OS libraries and on the type
>>of internationalization support the OS provides indirectly?
>>
>>Thomas
>
>
>#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
>#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp     


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2007 08:03:43 UTC