[spec] IRIs, IDNs, and all that international jazz

[Petite Abeille]

> On Dec 23, 2020, at 11:00, marc <marcx2 at welz.org.za> wrote:
> 
> TLDR:
> 
> I am with bie on the matter. Option 3 is a bridge
> too far for me too.
> 
> Wall Of Text:

Actually, I do have sympathy for your position. And, yes, you are technically correct. The best kind of correct. No arguments here.

Unicode is a big pill to swallow. This is why we have been stuck with ASCII for so long. And yes, technically, everything can be transcoded back and forth between ASCII and The World.

Machines talking to machines. 

But, personally, I think this is missing the bigger picture about what Gemini is about.

It's not purely a technical endeavor. 

After all -as people keep pointing out ad nauseam- if you want gopher/http/whatnot, you know where to find them.

Gemini has a humanistic stride to it. Some poetry, dare I say. Esthetics matters. A human touch matters.

This is why Unicode matters. It's the human face of a technology. This counts for something.

As someone used to say: "Technology alone is not enough". This should strike a cord with a community rooted in gopher, of all things. Gopher is not a "technology", it's a community, in the best sense of the term: people talking and sharing with other people. An exchange of ideas.

This is what Gemini cares about: people. Not technology. Even if technology is necessary to achieve its humanistic goals.

It's therefore my opinion that technologists like us should make the extra effort to make our technology  as human friendly as possible. Even if this cost us something. We can do it. For the community.

“The details are not the details; they are the product”
-- Charles and Ray Eames