Re: UTF-8 identifiers [was: Re: Lua t-shirts]

[Jerome Vuarand <jerome.vuarand@...>]

2009/10/5 Petite Abeille <petite_abeille@mac.com>:
>
> On Oct 5, 2009, at 2:52 PM, David Given wrote:
>
>> Right now I'm working on site in Korea.
>>
>> Trust me, forcing identifiers to be ASCII *in no way helps* cross-border
>> communication.
>
> So... how is your Korean coming along?
>
> Ironically, looking at, hmmm, a typical Korean site such as the one from the
> Blue House, every single link seems to be in plain, old US-ASCII:
>
> http://www.president.go.kr/kr/index.php
>
> Ditto for the Japanese, e.g. the Imperial Household Agency:
>
> http://sankan.kunaicho.go.jp/
>
> Ditto for the Chinese:
>
> http://www.gov.cn/
>
> Ditto for the Javascript code code associated with the above site:
>
> http://203.192.2.21/webdig.js?z=1
>
> Go figure. Perhaps US-ASCII is the lingua franca of programming.

I think the real reason is poor support for non-ascii URLs, especially
in some western browsers. As you may have noticed most of these sites
have an english version, and they probably don't want to confuse too
much old english-only browsers, proxies, or even their server software
stack.

On the other hand if you know that your target audience all have a
common mother-language and may be less than fluent in english,
localizing everything may make more sense.