- From: Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>
- Date: Tue, 6 Feb 1996 10:04:55 -0500
- To: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp
- Cc: masinter@parc.xerox.com, keld@dkuug.dk, uri@bunyip.com
>> Or fix the problem by allowing specification of the encoding used for >> the URL's. > >That's no fix. > >If you allow specification of the encoding, what we can see on paper >is resulting lengthy specification of the encoding concatenated with >lengthy 7bit encoding of the URL body. Don't be silly. On paper, people will be looking at glyphs, and thereby associat them with characters (one way of decoding information). On the Internet, computers will be looking at a set of octets, and mapping them to characters by using some information about the encoding used for the characters. The end result is the same (a mapping to characters), but the process is entirely different, and rightly so. The point is simply this: if I give a business card to someone, and it has a URL pointing to something with kanji in it, then if that person goes to a SJIS systems and types in the URL, the server needs to know how to map that set of octets to a resource. The results might vary widely depending on whether the data was transmitted as SJIS, EUC or UTF-8, if there is no encoding information. I agree that such URL's are not very useful in an international setting, but that does not mean they should be dissallowed entirely. That is like saying that Japanese should only use romanji. >> Yes, there is an Internet directory put out by Gakken (I forget the >> name) that had such an article last month. > >Then, Gakken should be wrong. Or, you may be confusing URL and >text content. I most certainly did not confuse a URL with content (very difficult to do, especially as I can read Japanese). I guess you, I, and a lot of other people, think that if people really want to be global, they should avoid using kanji, or whatever, in URL's. However, as a persoan at Astec said, and I agree, people *will* put kanji into resource names, and they *will* expect it to work. As such, I think it better to design a system that can handle *all* cases, as users expect them to be handled.
Received on Tuesday, 6 February 1996 10:26:23 UTC