Hi > > It's 2020, can we please be allowed to use french in our links? > > And it is even more important for people who use scripts like arabic, > chinese, devanageri, etc. I am to be convinced that unicode URLs are a good thing. And I say that as a native speaker of a language which includes glyphs which aren't in US ASCII. An URL is an address, in the same way that a phone number or an IP is an address. Ideally these are globally unique, unambiguous and representable everywhere. This address scheme should be independent of a localisation. We don't insist that phone numbers are rendered in roman numerals either. My dialing prefix isn't +XXVII. The gemini:// prefix isn't tweeling:// in dutch. Using unicode in addresses balkanises this global space into separate little domains, with subtle ambiguities (is the cyrilic C the same as a latin - C, who knows ?), reducing security, and making crossover harder. If somebody points me at an url in kanji or ethiopian, I would have great difficulty remembering nevermind recreating it, even if the photo there is useful to the rest of the world. If you are saying what about the guy from Ethiopia - well, I suspect he would have trouble with kanji too... without a common denominator this is an N^2 problem. I appreciate that many languages are in decline and even facing extinction - but interacting with the internet requires a jargon or specialisation anyway, in the same way that botanists invoke latin names, mathematicians write about eigenvectors and brain surgeons talk about the hippocampus, all regardless of which languages they speak at home. TLDR: The words after the gemini => link can be unicode, the link itself should not. regards marc
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