[UA-discuss] Maybe email addresses and URLs might not matter anymore?

[Charles 'chaals' (McCathie) Nevile]

I think we could generalise. UA is going to matter more to people who have
keyboards that cover their "own" character set - examples include greek,
cyrillic, korean, arabic - rather than people who are already used to
writing ascii characters to generate their own characters as is the case
with chinese and japanese. (I think Indic scripts are in the former group,
but I don't know for sure..).

The reason is that if you type ascii already, then your input method
happily generates ASCII, you are familiar with using the characters to
spell, so there isn't much at stake. Whereas if you are working in say
Russian, and need to switch to a different keyboard just to type an email
address, it's really pretty annoying. Russian keyboards often have the
corresponding qwerty keys printed in the corner - almost as big as the
cyrillic letter that is the expected primary character - precisely to deal
with this situation because it is so common.

A vast number of russians, that I would guess is a significant majority of
all russian speakers, know the latin alphabet. Given that there are subtle
differences between e.g. Russian and Belorussian an Ukranian cyrillic
alphabets, the same issues arise as for most European languages written
with Latin characters, but using diacritics like é or "extra" characters
like ø that are not in ASCII. Even english uses those, but like other
Europeans we have become more tolerant of moulding the language to fit the
system ever since we moved from typewriters that made it easy to computers
incapable of handling them...

These are cultures that are still close to the America-centric internet
where email addresses and URLs matter, whereas the idea of typing a
Japanese URL to check that it is not a phishing attack is ludicrous, given
the actual process of doing so *lends itself* to phishing attacks. So it
might be that these cultures actually continue to lead in driving
acceptance of the necessity to handle more than ASCII - when you can use a
crossed-L (common in Polish) or a double-accented-O (like a Hungarian), we
might have done the development properly so that the systems actually cope
with Ethiopic or Kabyle out of the box, meaning that people wanting to use
those alphabets don't have to be pioneers asking their colleagues to go
through the painful and often pointless exercise of tying to use an email
address that doesn't work.

Norwegians can often afford to drive social change. It is often a much
greater effort for an Ethiopian to drive the same changes, particularly in
an area like UA. Which is why I admire so much the work done in e.g. India
and Egypt by our colleagues who are nevertheless making those efforts to
move the world forward.

cheers

Chaals	

On Wed, 29 Jul 2020 21:31:49 +1000, John Levine
<john.levine at standcore.com> wrote:

> In article <017c01d6655d$054525f0$0fcf71d0$@acm.org> you write:
>> John Levine wrote:
>>
>>> China is a very large special case, because literally everyone in  
>>> China has a
>>> Wechat acccount and that's their online identity. Statista says they  
>>> have 1.2
>>> billion active users.
>>>
>>> To the extent they use e-mail, it's to communicate with people in other
>>> countries.
>>
>> Using EAI email addresses not so important then?
>
> Not in China. We talked to Tencent about a year and a half ago, and
> learned that the way most people type Chinese into their computers is
> ASCII pinyin so they know the ASCII alphabet even if they don't speak
> English. E-mail addresses are often either the pinyin or their numeric
> account ID at whatever service hosts the mail.  Tencent will probably
> support EAI but not due to command from their own customers.
>
> If someone has an unusual name written with an uncommon character,
> when he says what his name is he often wiill draw the character in the
> air with his finger which doesn't help if you can't see him. The
> pinyin comes directly from the sound of the name so it's a better mail
> identifier than the uncommon character.
>
> R's,
> John
>
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