RE: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27.

Death of ASCII, film at 11.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-tag-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> Joshua Allen
> Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2003 11:43 AM
> To: Tim Bray; Roy T. Fielding
> Cc: WWW-Tag
> Subject: RE: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27.
> 
> 
> 
> > > I'll take issue with that.  Using localized characters in a
> namespace
> > > is an incredibly stupid idea that will result in systems that ...
> 
> > > regret it as soon as their namespace becomes interesting outside
> their
> > > own locality.
> 
> How does it then follow that people should use ASCII?  Is it 
> not obvious
> that Chinese will soon bypass English+French+German as the dominant
> character-encoding for information on the web?
> 
> People who do not design for UTF-16 run serious risk of marginalizing
> themselves to a limited local audience and becoming obsolete.  I have
> seen this firsthand more than once.  Companies which designed their
> systems with the assumption that ISO-8859-1 was adequate are 
> finding it
> a roadblock to their plans to expand beyond domestic markets and are
> taking significant expense to remove this roadblock.
> 
> > effectiveness, and their metrics may well include appeal to a local
> > audience, if I have a web site for a nice local bookshop in 
> Warsaw or
> 
> This is an interesting point, and worth arguing.  But I hope 
> we are not
> arguing this in the context of "Western-European is global-ready;
> everything else is used for Svetlana's ethnic outpost".  "Local"
> languages like Thai and English will still have a place on 
> the web, like
> you say, but sites which rely on ASCII encoding will find it
> increasingly difficult to achieve a global reach.
> 
> 
>