- From: Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>
- Date: Thu, 22 Jun 95 21:57:41 JST
- To: uri@bunyip.com
>The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that if URNs are to be as >persistent as possible, that they should be numeric (or alphanumeric codes >like the LoC numbers or British/Canadian postal code system). If you use >human-readable names like "proper" or "ibm" people will get emotional and/or >possessive about them, making it much harder to prevent the URNs containing >them from changing over time. Please don't think all the phrases represented in ASCII are English phrases. I am a native user of Japanese, a non-English and non-Latin language. As such it should be noted that all the languages in the world can be represented witn Latin alphabet without diacritical marks. Moreover, people around the globe are educated to be able to understand the ASCII-only representation as a secondry (or tertially or forthly) best representation. For example, all the Japanese can understand that the following Japanse phrases represented in pure ASCII: "Ohayou Gozaimasu", which should be meaningless to you, means "Good morning". And the phrase "ibm" is a lot more international. Thus, it's better than any alphanumeric coding. On the other hand, half hearted approaches for internationalization such as ISO 8859/1 or ISO 10646 (including but not limited to Unicode) are completely unacceptable to most of the users of non-European languages. So, ASCII-only UR* is the best compromise. Masataka Ohta
Received on Thursday, 22 June 1995 09:12:55 UTC