You are right, that many people do not have experiences with 4000+ symbols to use on a daily bases, and they think an international standard to cover alphabet languages of three: Latin, Greek and may be Cyrillic is good enough to call it an IDN. Chinese can offer a Five Stroke analogy to the 26 letter case, at least it is a 5:26 problem:-)
Liana On Tue, 9 Oct 2001 12:08:32 -0400 "ben" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > > Already today, people can register domainnames with characters > which > look > > "similar" like 'o' and 0, or '1' and 'l'. I.e. this is not a new > >problem. > > I have been discussing my Supreme CDN system offline and have come > to > the conclusion that it will *never* become a standard because it is > simply not interoperable with existing systems. But as I have said, > that is okay as I believe all along that all the other CDN systems > (although not as perfect as mine) are absolutely 100% fine exactly > the > way they are. > > Offline, I have gotten less then pleasant remarks about why "some > people are trying to cause trouble/delay the progress/make things > more > difficult then they really are/etc, etc." Those remarks are made > *not* because of a lack of respect for people's contribution to this > WG but simply because of a lack of understanding of the Chinese > culture and why TC<->SC is so important- which can lead to > fustrations > that are fully understandable. Although we may never come up with a > solution that will be agreed upon by the majority of this WG, the > fact > remains that TC<->SC is of paramount importance to the users of > CDNs... and the above 'O', '0','1','l' issue just gave me a good > idea > on how to explain why it is so (not sure if this analogy had ever > been > made before, but it shouldn't hurt to repeat it.) > > At first, the '1','l' may not seem like a good analogy for TC<->SC > conversion because we definitely do *not* want to map 'l' with '1'. > However, the confusion of '1' and 'l' does illustrate why TC<->SC is > so important. For example, when a person is given 'l.TLD', he can > easy type in '1.TLD' instead and have absolutely no idea why he > cannot > reach the intended website. In English the chance of such a > confusion > is only limited to a few cases (such as '0' and '1') where as for > Chinese, *every single* Chinese character poises the opportunity for > such confusion. Remember, Simplified Chinese and Traditional > Chinese > are indistinguishable to many users of CDNs of certain > backgroud/education/location/culture. (Given certain Chinese > characters, even someone as educated in Chinese as I, cannot tell > you > whether it is traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese.) > > Thanks > Ben Chan > > > > > > > >
