RE: Grinding to a halt on Issue 27.

> is obviously very important.  However, we are not talking about the
> information that is presented -- we are talking about the identifiers
> used to route people towards that information, and in particular the
> identifiers used to denote a namespace for internal processing by

Are you interested in feedback on this issue?  I am currently the person
at MSFT who is on the hook to make decisions when our Japanese customers
call with demands about support for Japanese language in namespace
identifiers.  Admittedly, I only see these issues when they have
escalated to become a formal product change request from a customer who
is experiencing negative business impact, but the issue *has* come up.

These customers are not very understanding when told they are not
permitted to use Japanese namespace names (and are even less forgiving
when told that they are not permitted to use Japanese URLs).  I'm not
looking for advice from you on how to respond to these people, simply
educating you on a very real and well-documented set of facts from one
particular software vendor.  I would be very surprised if W3C/IETF IRI
working groups do not already have some domain experts in this area who
can educate you further.

> ASCII is still the lowest common denominator, even when it is being
> used to phonetically describe non-English words.

This is factually incorrect.  For example, Japanese vastly prefer to use
katakana as the lowest common denominator for phonetically describing
non-Japanese words (including English words), and Chinese in Taiwan tend
to use BoPoMo.

> No, that is not obvious.  Maybe you should ask someone who is Chinese
> about the effect of a global market on communication

Can't you find Chinese people of your own to ask?

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2003 20:36:28 UTC