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

[Solderpunk]

On Thu Dec 24, 2020 at 12:48 PM CET, marc wrote:

> Note how the global telephone system has made it into the furthest
> corners of the planet - arguably further than the internet, and did
> so without worrying about internationalisation relating to their
> URL equivalents (phone numbers)...

This is not really a compelling comparison at all.  Even if different
languages and cultures use different words and symbols for numbers, the
overwhelming majority of them use base 10, meaning there is a
straightforward and unambiguous mapping between them all.  Almost
anybody can read/write and say/hear a phone number in their native
language, making it much easier to memorise and transmit them.  I don't
know if it was ever done (I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was), but
it would be no technical problem at all to manufacture either a DTMF or
rotary phoneset which had 一, 二, 三, etc. printed on it instead of 1,
2, 3 and have it work correctly anywhere on Earth.  Even if this couldn't
be done and people had to learn a foreign system of numeric symbols,
the fact that there's only 10 of them and that they map directly to
native equivalents makes them much easier to learn.  And, of course, the
Arabic numeral system was already widely used across many languages and
cultures before the phone system arrived, and people in all cultures
already had practice reading, writing and memorising numeric values for
many other reasons (calendars and money are ancient technology).

Cheers,
Solderpunk