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

[bie]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 12:48:50PM +0100, marc wrote:
> The insinuation was that internationalised URLs are essential
> because people who don't speak english at all might not be
> able to comprehend or (if their input system is sufficiently
> different) generate ascii/latin text.
> 
> And my argument is that this doesn't make sense, as 
> every gemini url starts with "gemini://" which is ascii text
> in a language that nobody speaks anymore. And if people can manage
> to type "gemini://" then a bit more ascii in the hostname or
> even path should be quite manageable too even for "people who
> use scripts like arabic, chinese, devanageri, etc." to quote
> another list participant.
> 
> A pity that I failed to convey this point properly -
> you and I (and bie, and some others) have had a very similar
> conversation on the 7th and 9th of this month (under the subject
> "IDN with Gemini"), where I tried to explain my position that
> I view as a language as a communications protocol and not the
> property of an ethnicity or nation.
> 
> The desire to be inclusive is good, but we are deferential
> to pretty recent concept/meme - the monolingual nation state,
> which is say 200 or 300 years old. Before that (at least
> in europe, but elsewhere too) each little region had pretty strong
> regional dialect or even language (limited mobility or literacy
> allows for rapid linguistic drift). People who were educated spoke
> a second or third language to interact with the clergy or the palaces
> far away.
> 
> In this regard having people know learn a new language to interact
> with the internet isn't that much of an imposition, but a return
> to the way things were... just scaled up to the size of the planet. 

Just an anecdote I briefly brought up on IRC...

I briefly experimented with percent-encoded Japanese and Norwegian
addresses on some of my capsules, but quickly gave up and went back to 
pure ASCII. *Not* because typing in percent-encoded names was annoying,
but because I realized how hard it was to verbally convey my Japanese
addresses to my Norwegian friends and vice versa. The de facto
universality of ASCII might something to embrace, not something to run away
from, if we want to be serious about being inclusive.

(marc - your posts in this thread have been great.. really appreciate
them!)

bie