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

[S Maniam]

Hi

Anyone did testing on indic scripts.
looking for Tamil scripts updates.

rgds

~Maniam

On Tue, 8 Sep 2020, 11:54 Charles 'chaals' (McCathie) Nevile, <
chaals at yandex.ru> wrote:

> 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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