- From: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
- Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 14:39:28 -0400
- To: Jonathan Rosenne <rosennej@qsm.co.il>, 'Slim Amamou' <slim@alixsys.com>
- cc: "'Mark Davis ?'" <mark@macchiato.com>, public-iri@w3.org, bidi@unicode.org, 'Shawn Steele' <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>, 'Murray Sargent' <murrays@exchange.microsoft.com>, aharon@google.com
--On Tuesday, May 25, 2010 13:51 +0300 Jonathan Rosenne <rosennej@qsm.co.il> wrote: > It certainly is a misunderstanding. A kid in Egypt or Israel > who has not yet learnt a second language should be able to use > the internet in his own language and script, i.e. exclusively > RTL. Jony (and others), In principle, I agree. In practice, this opens up several groups of problems. I do not expect us to reach agreement on solutions (or even whether solutions are needed), but I think it would be helpful if we could agree on the nature of the problems / difficulties. I've got a bias about the right answer -- almost everyone who has thought about the issues does even though their/our conclusions differ -- but I'm going to try to write what follows as neutrally as I can. (1) One can optimize for identifiers (including, but not limited to URIs/ IRIs) that make good intuitive sense for people without much computer sophistication and without a global perspective. I assume you "kid ... who has not yet learnt a second language" would fall into that category, but I think it is broader than just those kids. Doing that optimization implies identifiers that are not globally usable, at least for other people of the same type but from different cultures, since conventions and assumptions differ. And, of course, normally RotL environments aren't the only issue. Some would argue that matching of Simplified and Traditional Chinese; US and British spelling of English; matching of Kana and Kanji or Hangul and Hanji spelling of strings; matching Eastern Arabic-Indic, Arabic-Indic, and European digits; and so on are equivalent problems in which an unsophisticated user may have different (but entirely reasonable to themselves) expectations from someone with a better understanding of how things work. (2) One can optimize for globally-useful identifiers. Doing so makes export of identifiers from one environment to another much easier and more obvious. It makes it far easier to construct search engines that work globally, browsers and other applications software that are largely locale-independent, and so on. By requiring that the same identifiers work everywhere, it makes it far easier for people who travel to faraway places and borrow machines or use local kiosks to access the Internet. In some contexts, those advantages are probably more about "possible" than they are about "easier". But the price is that things require more learning and become a lot less intuitive for much of the world's population, including all of those who are the greatest beneficiaries of the first optimization. For historical reasons (at least), the further one's language or writing system are from Western European Latin-based forms, the less intuitive and more difficult the obvious global identifiers are likely to seem (although I was recently told, quite convincingly, that we could solve many of our problems by changing our global identifier script from Basic Latin to Hangul). (3) It is not clear that there is a middle ground. Certainly it is hard to deduce one from the positions taken by the passionate advocates of one or the other of the optimizations above. Some of those who think there is such a position say things about global identifiers that are not routinely seen by end user and that can be localized by some sort of layering mechanism. While several such proposals have been sketched out, none have gained traction, in part because the one thing the advocates of the two optimizations above usually agree on is that they don't like such middle grounds. The problem is very hard and I've gradually gotten pessimistic about whether real progress is possible (at least before things get worse). But it has become clear to me that the difference between those first two optimizations rests on rather fundamental philosophical assumptions and that trying to persuade people from one camp of the rightness of the positions of the other by citing the needs of children, people without Latin characters on their keyboards, or the horrors of a world in which some URIs/IRIs (or some email addresses, etc.) are inaccessible to lots of people is not working well... or at all. best, john
Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2010 18:40:14 UTC