Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

Hello Henri,

On 2015/02/14 19:16, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 2:06 AM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

>> You will find, I expect, mainly white
>
> Seems odd to bring up skin color in the mailing list context.
>
>> english-speaking male technology experts.
>
> When I was drafting the email you quote, I wrote a pre-emptive rant
> about how trite an explanation "English" is for the lack of first-hand
> testimony. But then I deleted that mini-rant, because I didn't want to
> pre-emptively rant against points that hadn't been raised. Sadly, I
> was good at guessing. In this case, the notion that the requirement to
> use English just happens to filter out all the testimony that would
> support the forward proxy architecture doesn't work.
>
> If the use case is postulated to exist in "Africa", it's not really
> the case that no one knows English in "Africa", so you'd need a magic
> correlation of the parts of Africa postulated to depend on proxies and
> the parts of Africa where English skills aren't as readily available.
> If the use case is postulated to exist on "remote islands", there
> exist remote islands where English is spoken:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands

I have to agree very much with Tim. I wanted to write about this 
earlier, but then (as usual) Tim was expressing things in a much clearer 
way than I'd probably be able to do. But apparently that wasn't clear 
enough yet, so I'll give it another try.

It's not "English" in and by itself, but a combination of many factors. 
As an example, even if English is spoken by most if not all technically 
savvy people in India, and there is quite a large number of such people, 
there's hardly anybody (or let's just say nobody, until we hear from a 
lurker) from India on this list. Even for something of supposedly direct 
interest, the Indian Layout Taskforce [1], it took and is still taking 
us (mostly Richard Ishida) a lot of time and effort to just barely get 
it going.

One way to see the problem clearly is to understand that it is about as 
difficult for technically remote people (which may include physical 
remoteness as well as other factors such as language,..., none of it 
necessarily decisive alone) to even *imagine* that they in any way could 
influence technology as it seems to be for you to imagine that somebody 
would not come up with the idea that it's possible to influence technology.

Regards,   Martin.

P.S.: As you seem to be interested in a statistical approach, I'd just 
like to note that if even one of the inhabitants of Pitcairn (current 
population apparently somewhere around 50) would write a single mail to 
the TAG list, Pitcairn would have a *significantly* higher ratio of 
contributions to this list than e.g. the US or Finland :-).

[1] http://www.w3.org/International/groups/indic-layout/

Received on Saturday, 14 February 2015 12:54:57 UTC