Bob wrote,
> "kmm027: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" ?????
> What a piece of derivative Allisat wannabe shite.
No offense, Bob; I didnt mean to intrude on your intellectual
territory.
Admittedly it was too long, but nobody reads terse pieces in depth,
or responds thoughtfully to much else either, so I am not surprised
by your response. Nevertheless, I believe the task of finding a
conceptual foundation for net administration is getting lost among
the trees of trademark and case law and 'representation' of an
uncountable user population. The 'language engineering' going on in
other fields offers legitimate grounds for taking seriously the
*communicative* challenge which is, I think, ICANNs real mandate.
See below, for instance. If XML has (since 1995) put some running
code under Carrasco's vision, why shouldnt we look at making the
DNS 'upwardly compatible'? Even if it doesnt - God forbid! - resolve
every legal issue, it would at least put them on a different ground.
Sure, it may be that every other issue will resolve once the legal
ground has stabilized, but I for one dont feel optimistic. I hope,
when you have thought it through, you will be able to agree -- not
necessarily with me, but with this alternative *idea.
kerry
===============
Web Internationalization
Manuel Tomas CARRASCO BENITEZ
European Commission
Jean Monnet Building
L-2920 Luxembourg
Telephone : +352 467303
Fax : +352 467302
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.crpht.lu/~carrasco/winter
[down, but mirrored at http://www.dragoman.org/winter/inter.html ]
Abstract: This document discusses the Internationalization of the
Web. A Web capable of supporting different cultures, natural
languages and Language Engineering facilities such as Parallel
Texts. Internationalization permeates most subsystem: client,
transmission, server, data and authoring; the primitive mechanism
for Internationalization should be part of the Web foundations.
[...]
Character set
Unicode (ISO 10646 BMP) is proposed. There was the consensus
for Unicode at the BOF meeting in Darmstadt. Some people prefer
a full 4 bytes ISO 10646, as opposed to 16 bits Unicode; note that
ISO 10646 talks about 4 bytes and not 32 bits, although in storage
terms it is the same. Unicode includes most of the world
languages. The 16 bits are the force and the weakness of Unicode.
The force because one can represent all the characters; the
weakness because it is an overkill for English. Without
compression, it duplicates the disk space and the transmission by
two. The top 8 bits are not needed for English; i.e., they are set to
zero. Having a large character set is a basic element for
multilinguism; i.e., processing several languages with very different
alphabets simultaneously. For example, shown in the same page
English and Greek, by opposition to English or Greek.
=========
See also D. Connolly's 1995 INTERNET-DRAFT MIT/W3C (draft-
ietf-html-charset-harmful-00.txt ), "Character Set Considered
Harmful" and
the report from the IETF Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) Working
Group ( http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/uri/ )
