Hello again > > 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. > > This theory, in the world of domain names, is wrong. RFC 2277 says... Your reliance on one RFC as an authority while rejecting another RFC as "a one-sided anti-internationalization rant" does not strike me as being consistent. > > reducing security, > > That's false. I stil wait to see an actual phishing email with > Unicode. Most of the time, the phisher does not even bother to have a > realistic URL, they advertise <http://evil.example/famousbank> and it > works (few people check URL). > > Anyway, the goal of Gemini is not to do onli banking so this is not > really an issue. There exists a neat quote by a certain B. Russel on people who are so very sure of themselves. The gemini spec fixes the url length in octets. Various ways of encoding internationalised data may make it possible for a bad guy to shrink and grow urls in unexpected ways and clobber this buffer. The interaction between filesystems, archiving software or protocol gateways generates many more aliasing problems. > Now, identifiers, like domain names, > are a complicated case, since they are both protocol elements and > text. But, since they are widely visible (in advertisments, business > cards, etc), I believe they should be internationalized, too. Imagine a slightly different world where people don't exchange business cards, but a small amount of sheet music - their own personal jingle (retrofuturism, right ?). It turns out sheet music music is annotated in Italian - I think it can say things like "forte" or "pianissimo". Would you ago around and angrily cross out those words to replace them with your local language ? > > subtle ambiguities (is the cyrilic C the same as a latin - C, who > > knows ?), > > There is no ambiguity, U+0421 is different from U+0043. There are various insults starting with latin C. Rewriting them to start with cyrilic C doesn't make them any less insulting. > > Using unicode in addresses balkanises this global space > > The english-speaking space is not a global space: it is the space of a > minority of the world population. [WARNING: wall of text ahead] I think here we are heading to core of the argument... of what a language is. And it is a big split that many don't know how to articulate: Some see language as a core part of their identity (who they are) - others see language as a tool for communicating (a protocol). I think tying ones identity to a nation/ethnicity and its language sets one up for conflict both internally (who one is) and externally (between states). It is also silly - languages actually evolve quite rapidly and leave significant imprints on each other, while people migrate (or get conquered, sadly). So I think it is better *not* to view english as the property of a particular ethnicity, but as as a popular communications protocol - an earlier protocol might have been latin, which left significant influences on english - and if mandarin (or hindi, or whatever) ends up displacing english in turn, then I expect there to be many traces of english to be left there too. It is easy to envy native english speakers - that they have it easier. But that is not true - being multilingual is a real advantage, in so many ways: Being able to speak an extra language, for instance, is a major protective factor against dementia... and every extra language one learns makes it easier to learn the next. Bible scholars have no issues acquiring a decent grasp of Hebrew and Ancient Greek, philosophers might try to read Imanuel Kant in German. Most of us have arbitrarily tied our identities to a nation state and thus a that nation's language - it really doesn't have to be that way. regards marc
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