- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:43:24 -0700
- To: "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>, "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@apache.org>
- Cc: "WWW-Tag" <www-tag@w3.org>
> > 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