- From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:18:59 +0100
- To: "'Martin Duerst'" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>, "'Sarmad Hussain'" <sarmad.hussain@nu.edu.pk>
- Cc: "'Jonathan Rosenne'" <rosennej@qsm.co.il>, <www-international@w3.org>, <public-iri@w3.org>, <psayo@idrc.org.in>, "'Maria Ng Lee Hoon'" <mng@idrc.org.sg>, "'nayyara.karamat -'" <nayyara.karamat@nu.edu.pk>, <cc@panl10n.net>
> -----Original Message----- > From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp] > Sent: 20 August 2007 07:37 > As an example, consider the TLD for Switzerland, "ch". > Switzerland is a multilingual country with four official > languages (see top left of http://www.admin.ch/). > It would only be confusing both inside Switzerland as well as > outside if different languages used differnt TLDs for > Switzerland. For many people, the "ch" is just conventional, > best known because it appears on the back of many cars. > The "ch" is actually taken from the Latin (language, not > script) name of the country, "Confoederatio Helvetica", but > many people don't realize that, and for TLDs, it doesn't > really matter. What matters is that people who want to know > the TLD of Switzerland can look it up, can remember it, can > type it, and so on. It's a benefit if a TLD is easily > derivable from the country name (e.g. "fr" for France), but > it's not always so, because otherwise, there would be > clashes. It would be very confusing if a TLD changed > depending on language (e.g. "ge" for Germany in English > rather than the current "de" (Deutschland, Germany in > German), or "al" for Allemagne (Germany in French), or the > many other names that Germany has in various languages. It > might help some people a tiny bit, but it would make it > impossible to send URIs using these TLDs across language > boundaries, and would lead to conflicts because there are > only so many two-letter combinations. I think it's important to note that this only works well because people writing any of the Swiss languages or English can easily type the letters 'ch' from their keyboard. If the TLD had been ch I think there would have been a lot of problems. I think that, if we are to use non-latin characters for script-based TLDs, they must only be characters that are readily accessible from keyboards of people writing any language that uses that script. RI
Received on Thursday, 23 August 2007 18:16:54 UTC