RE: URIs and i18n

I enjoyed reading Cindy Sue's response on the importance of a person's name. I too have long advocated that the most important area of i18n is getting a person's name right. After all these are your customers and without happy customers you may not have a market for your product and thus other areas of i18n become a mute point. I wrote an article on the topic of getting a person's name right and you can find it at http://www.translationdirectory.com/article467.htm. This article also references some comments by Michael Everson on this same topic. 

-----Original Message-----
From: www-international-request@w3.org [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Cindy Sue Causey
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 1:40 PM
To: Phillips, Addison
Cc: www-international@w3.org
Subject: Re: URIs and i18n

On 7/28/08, Phillips, Addison <addison@amazon.com> wrote:

> Another issue is search: search engines pluck words from URIs, but only if
> they recognize them. In many cases, search engine optimizations do "strip
> accents" to improve search accuracy.
>
> On the other hand...
>
> Removing accents is asking people to misspell their names. In some languages
> the "misspelling" isn't too awful and users kind of understand it. But as
> you move around the world, you find increasingly that it is annoying or just
> not possible.



Taking this to an extremely personal level by experienced example..

And hopefully, I'm not repeating what someone else has already
implied, if not outright stated.. Oh, and accepting that technically,
it may cause issues with duplication re the mention I've seen of ASCII
and related......

Finding a way to internationally accommodate names in their [native
language], [alphabet] goes wholly to expression of *Respect* for the
individual bearing the name..

Speaking from firsthand experience :: Formally at first greeting to
people, I am "Cindy Sue".. This is also how I enter my name into
untold numbers of "First Name" fields across the Internet..

Until not that many years ago, most databases were not set up to
recognize the space in between the two words.. In as much as it was
coming from a machine, it was still insulting that the associated
business entity could not go that one step further to create a system
that recognized a full given name and that instead endlessly emailed
newsletters addressed to "Cindy".. As an advocate without end to the
ways it can be applied, immediate next first thought is for *ALL* the
others out there with every possible first name available who
undoubtedly experience some semblance of the same..

Our names are just about the very first thing that comes into the
World with us and indeed the very last to go with, too.. Hoping that
one day soon, internationally there *will* come a way that does show
respect for the whole person, accent grave, acute, et al(l), no matter
where we surf across the ever expanding universal Web..

Peace and best wishes from North Georgia..

"Cindy" to you all, a forever part of my more casual extended cyber
family.. :wink:

- :: -
Celebrating Olmstead ♥ June 22, 1999

CindySueCausey.blogspot.com
www.ButterflyBytes.com
Georgia Voices That Count, 2005
Talking Rock, GA, USA

Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2008 02:49:24 UTC