RE: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27.

> > I'll take issue with that.  Using localized characters in a
namespace
> > is an incredibly stupid idea that will result in systems that ...

> > regret it as soon as their namespace becomes interesting outside
their
> > own locality.

How does it then follow that people should use ASCII?  Is it not obvious
that Chinese will soon bypass English+French+German as the dominant
character-encoding for information on the web?

People who do not design for UTF-16 run serious risk of marginalizing
themselves to a limited local audience and becoming obsolete.  I have
seen this firsthand more than once.  Companies which designed their
systems with the assumption that ISO-8859-1 was adequate are finding it
a roadblock to their plans to expand beyond domestic markets and are
taking significant expense to remove this roadblock.

> effectiveness, and their metrics may well include appeal to a local
> audience, if I have a web site for a nice local bookshop in Warsaw or

This is an interesting point, and worth arguing.  But I hope we are not
arguing this in the context of "Western-European is global-ready;
everything else is used for Svetlana's ethnic outpost".  "Local"
languages like Thai and English will still have a place on the web, like
you say, but sites which rely on ASCII encoding will find it
increasingly difficult to achieve a global reach.

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2003 14:43:32 UTC