[UA-discuss] Language - how do you refer to non-ASCII to a non-technical audience?

[Dusan Stojicevic]

I apologize for the first thing, probably I was not precise. We don't know
who is reading (or is in the audience), and if we assume that all people can
read this doc (or hear this term), then we include "everybody" - meaning
also those who use ASCII in "local way of writing". And we are trying to
find something to represent "non-ASCII".
For the second one, I agree to the point that it needs not to be actually
wrong. For the rest, I still think that most convenient is non-English, but
only for this target audience. I don't want to go further into discussion
why nba.com for those people is "in" English language, or why 123456 is a
number for them (and that's how they remember and read this) but it's
actually PIN which is numeric password or it can be vehicle registration
plate with different meaning for each digit (without numeric value as a
whole number)... Let say, we agree that we disagree on this one :)

Cheers,
Dusan


-----Original Message-----
From: ua-discuss-bounces at icann.org [mailto:ua-discuss-bounces at icann.org] On
Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan
Sent: Thursday, August 4, 2016 5:05 AM
To: ua-discuss at icann.org
Subject: Re: [UA-discuss] Language - how do you refer to non-ASCII to a
non-technical audience?

On Thu, Aug 04, 2016 at 04:55:53AM +0200, Dusan Stojicevic wrote:
> And finally, in broader sense - "Your local way of writing" is a set of
all scripts, including ASCII which we want to exclude on the first place.
> 

I don't know what it would mean to try to exclude ASCII from the DNS.
In a registry, I suppose you could accept only U-labels for registration.
That wouldn't constrain subordinate names anyway.

> We need a simple term, few words, that can be understood properly by all,
which doesn't mean that we need to be technically precise... 
> 

Well, it needs not to be actually wrong, too.  Domain names aren't in a
language, and the repetition of the trope that this or that domain name is
"in" some language is doing a lot of harm.  It leads people to believe in
variant systems, tests of meaningfulness of domain names, and other fairy
stories that create lots of opportunities for demands that cannot be
satisfied.  If the goal of this project is universal acceptance, then we'd
best not create conditions where we make it even more likely people will
reject these domain names.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com