- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 00:50:59 PST
- To: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp
- Cc: gtn@ebt.com, dupuy@cs.columbia.edu, uri@bunyip.com
> In Japan, for these 10 years, UNIX file names with Japanese > Kanji has been widely available. But, it is not used at all. For longer than 10 years, Xerox XNS servers have allowed file names with Kanji names. I think the problem was that the UNIX systems were missing several important features. > One problem is that it is more difficult to type in the name in > Kanji than ASCII. It is difficult to type in the name in Kanji if you do not have a Japanese typing system; fortunately, the Star and Globalview system allowed you to select files by their names rather than having to type them. Now that ordinary users are getting such systems on their PCs finally, the rest of the world might experience this convenience. > The other problem is that systems with different locales > can not share files. This was not true; systems that did not have Japanese fonts had more difficulty sorting directories, but could see the names of those files that had roman character names. I think a global international naming system for data objects is possible and useful; I've used one. I miss it, actually. However, I also don't think it is possible or useful to 'tweak' the current URL structure to try to make it international. Unfortunately, the URN groups don't seem to have this problem in their charter, either.
Received on Wednesday, 14 February 1996 03:51:26 UTC