Re: <nettime> Asia and domain names, etc. (@)

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@btinternet.com>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 03:34:05AM +0900, david@2dk.net wrote:
> The question of 'chinese' is much more complicated, and certainly
> chauvinistic. [...]  In all cases they are double-byte characters,
> and need to be encoded first to be sent over the single-byte (roman
> character) based networks of the 'wired' network world. The encoding
> systems are also diverse. (There are debates within each of these
> nations about uniform encoding, much less the kind of problems that
> show up when databasing across cultures) Of course the Japanese
> encoding methods can not be imposed upon the Koreans, PRC and ROC
> and more than the PRC's abbreviated characters can be used in
> Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

I would hope that any international solution would involve Unicode
(http://www.unicode.org), which, after all, follows an international
standard, ISO 10646 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/), and neatly
supports all the languages you mention.  It seems to be nearly
universally supported now on computer systems made in the West; I'd be
interested to know to what extent it's been adopted in Asia.

-- 
Benjamin Geer
http://www.btinternet.com/~amisuk/bg

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