Re: [DNSOP] draft-liman-tld-names-04

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

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
[e-mail]
Shinkuro, Inc.