Re: <nettime> fred baker on international domain naming

[JC Helary <helary@eskimo.com>]

Le Fri, Jan 28, 2000 a 03:18:24AM -0100, nettime's_roving_reporter a ecrit:
>    in a way that builds the whole village, rather than Balkanizing it
>    into alleys and ghettos which do not understand each other and cannot
>    communicate. The road forward for a working Internet is to decide
>    together how to expand the domain name system and work together to
>    make it happen. The road to chaos - I should say "the freeway" - is to
>    force the issue using private schemes. We stand at the junction.

The standarts are all exposed at w3c.org in the 'internationalization'
section and internet protocols section. 

I am not a pro at this but the point is to have a encoding system that
allows for different languages simultaneously on the web, be it on the
display side or on the transfer side. The system is Unicode, http 1.1
supports it (?), html 4.0 and xhtml 1.0 do to but the browsers do a poor
job displaying everything and the oses are not flexible enough. 

Besides this, aol 'posseses' a big chunck of the net and similarly does
not allow access to outsiders, other companies are also trying to get
their share (check apple's internet policy) and other failed (msn). 

Plus, as mentioned in the paper, Chinese is still chinese to most of us,
so who cares ? Just having all beautifully set up to realize the perfect
communication utopia won't necessarily make it happen... Anybody here
willing to learn all of the world's languages to feel the thrill of being
potentially able to speak to the whole planet ? 

The paper mentions the US-centric system and a few lines later the fact
that it is an international standart. Interesting comment. It is sure used
by the international internet community, but certainly not makes it a
standart. It is only a system designed by people who had an english
language based vision of electronic exchanges (read asci), and just like
the y2k bug proves more a lack of imagination than anything else. 

JC Helary




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