From: Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>
Message-Id: <199508170424.NAA09118@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp>
Subject: Re: Globalizing URIs
To: mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch (Martin J Duerst)
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 13:24:18 JST
In-Reply-To: <199508150501.OAA23169@cccd.cc.titech.ac.jp>; from "Martin J Duerst" at Aug 14, 95 6:04 pm
> >As is proven with passports and airline tickets, 26 Latin characters
> >are more than enough to represent names internationally.
>
> Let us just think a little further along the same line:
>
> As is proven with telephone numbers, ten digits are more than
> enough to address anybody with a telephone around the world.
Wrong. My number, +81-3-5734-3299, has 11 digits.
> For personal names, the same is easily possible by designing
> a world-wide system of social security numbers.
For personal identification, but definitely not for names.
> >So, please don't try to solve a non-existent problem.
>
> I guess Japanese travelling around the world would be more than
> happy to have their names in Kanji/Kana on their flight tickets
Absolutely not.
> (of course besides the Latin form for the clerks that have to deal
> with these tickets),
How can you let that clerk input my name correctly, if I purchase
an airline ticket abroad?
> to have anouncement boards in foreign airports
> that show anouncements in Japanese, and even to have anouncements
> by voice in Japanese.
Japanese travelling around the world today are laughing at wrongly
represented Japanese on anouncement boards in foreign airports.
> The average Japanese has seen his/her name in Latin letters once
> in school (when Latin letters are thought), and occasionally for
> a credit card or passport application.
And on their e-mail addresses.
> Judging from the number of contributors to some Japanese mailing
> list, there is quite some percentage of Japanese that uses RFC 1522-
> encoded names in their mail headers,
In e-mail headers, Some are using RFC 1522 encoding, some are using
plain ASCII and others are using plain ISO-2022-JP with no encoding.
And, many thinks the last is the way to go.
Still, their e-mail addresses are and will continue to be plain ASCII.
So what?
> And I also know that on Macintoshes and some other computers,
> this is already easily possible, and heavily used.
Globalize domestic Machintosh, not URL.
> And it is true that the representation of Japanese with Latin
> letters is thought in Japanese schools, but there is not much
> time spent on this subject, and there is a great chance that
> the average Japanese, when asked to spell your last name
> with Latin letters, will spell it Outa or Ota or O-ta (the "-"
> should go as a bar above the O), but not necessarily Ohta,
> and show similar problems for other names.
That's no problem for URL.
> >Can your brain recognize Japanese characters?
>
> Leaving the problems of 'brain' and 'mind' to people in AI, I can
> definitely say that I can recognize and read Japanese, if it is written
> on paper or properly encoded in electronic mail.
Please make the discussion global. "your brain" means "brain of people
around the world".
> But for URLs in general, this is different. A Japanese author,
> writing documents for a Japanese user, should not be forced
> to make up document names with Latin characters.
I'm afraid you are talking about Japan localization, not globalizaiton.
Let them use % notation.
Masataka Ohta