On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 06:49:32AM +0900, Masataka Ohta wrote: > > If your local encoding is ISO 8859/1, you can input 'Y', but not > 'Y' with diaeresis. > > If your local encoding is Unicode but you are accustomed to ISO > 8859/1 environment, you will input 'Y', but not 'Y' with diaeresis. > > It does not affect abstract definitions of IDNA2008 but does > affect DNS operations.
Everyone who ever makes this kind of remark seems to imagine that the tools that they are using never affect the people using them. This is a preposterous assumption, akin to maintaining that it was impossible to learn to drive a car because horses don't have steering wheels. Of course it is true that different people in different environments have a hard time spelling things in another language. That is simply not an argument that localization can't possibly work. It is instead an argument that localization in a globalized system brings with it a bunch of challenges that cause users some difficulty. It is then a matter of trading off the difficulty of communicating when there are different ways of spelling "the same thing" (e.g. an ASCII-based one and, say, a Han-based one) against the difficulty for a user who just doesn't have an ASCII keyboard or even a left-to-right user input context. Of course that is hard. Nobody ever said it wasn't. But there is a gap between "hard" and "totally impossible", and I do not see any advantage in pretending that such a gap doesn't exist. A -- Andrew Sullivan [email protected] Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
