- From: Martin J. Duerst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Date: Fri, 1 Aug 1997 18:22:57 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: Gavin Nicol <gtn@eps.inso.com>
- cc: www-international@w3.org
On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Gavin Nicol wrote: > >> Query-Encoding: utf8 > >> Query-Encoding: shift-jis > >> > >> is preferrable to Query-UTF8. > > > >Of course if you have such an alternative suggestion, you > >are wellcome to write an internet-draft, too. > > > >But why should it be preferable? We have discussed this some time > >ago. I have argued that upgrading from chaos to labeled chaos > >is not a very big step ahead. > > It is a smaller step than going to UTF-8. Is a smaller step prefereable? A few years ago, there would have been strong arguments for your solution, because Unicode just wasn't around yet. But nowadays, more and more browsers support Unicode, and so the step of going to UTF-8 directly has become smaller. > >Ideally, URLs should never have contained anything else > >than UTF-8. > > Agreed, though personally, I think URL's should go away. The question is not whether they should go, but whether they will (soon) go away. If the answer is NO, then for i18n concerns, they are worth fixing. > >> Ideally, URL's should never contain queries anyway. > > > >Thanks for initiating a little bit of philosophical discussion. > > This is not random philosophical musings. It's definitely not random. But because it's philosophy, there is another philosophy that says the contrary. I for myself, although I can understand your position, see more of a continuum from naming to searching than a clear binary division. > Your proposal is a > patch over a broken design. If we had clean seperation, there would > be two problems: I18N of naming, and I18N of searches. They > could have the same technical resolution (use UTF-8), but that > doesn;t mean to say they need to share the same *mechanism*. Having the same technical solution simplifies implementation. And internationalized they need to be anyway. The question of whether we would be better off with two separate mechanisms is an interesting one, but it is independent of the question of how to do internationalization. Regards, Martin.
Received on Friday, 1 August 1997 12:23:04 UTC