IDN with Gemini?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 01:30:41PM +0100,
 marc <marcx2 at welz.org.za> wrote 
 a message of 45 lines which said:

> An URL is an address, in the same way that a phone number or an IP
> is an address. Ideally these are globally unique, unambiguous and
> representable everywhere.  This address scheme should be independent
> of a localisation.

This theory, in the world of domain names, is wrong. RFC 2277 says
that "protocol elements" (basically, the things the user does not see
such as the MIME type text/gemini) do not have to be
internationalized. Everything else ("text", says the RFC) must be
internationalized, simply because the world is like that, with
multiple scripts and languages. Now, identifiers, like domain names,
are a complicated case, since they are both protocol elements and
text. But, since they are widely visible (in advertisments, business
cards, etc), I believe they should be internationalized, too.

> Using unicode in addresses balkanises this global space

The english-speaking space is not a global space: it is the space of a
minority of the world population.

> subtle ambiguities (is the cyrilic C the same as a latin - C, who
> knows ?),

There is no ambiguity, U+0421 is different from  U+0043.

> reducing security,

That's false. I stil wait to see an actual phishing email with
Unicode. Most of the time, the phisher does not even bother to have a
realistic URL, they advertise <http://evil.example/famousbank> and it
works (few people check URL).

Anyway, the goal of Gemini is not to do onli banking so this is not
really an issue.

> If somebody points me at an url in kanji or ethiopian, I would have
> great difficulty remembering nevermind recreating it,

It is safe to assume that a URL in ethiopian is for people who speak
the relevant language so it is not a problem. 

> without a common denominator this is an N^2 problem.

There is no common denominator (unless someone decided that everybody
must use english but I don't remember such decision).

> but interacting with the internet requires
> a jargon or specialisation anyway, in the same way that botanists
> invoke latin names, mathematicians write about eigenvectors
> and brain surgeons talk about the hippocampus, all regardless
> of which languages they speak at home.

OK, then let's all use Hangul for URL. (It's a nice script, very
regular, so it is convenient for computer programs.)