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Comment by averagewall | Hacker News Reader

Do unicode URLs actually provide any real value? Every web user must be already used to typing Latin characters because so many major websites use them. So nobody would be excluded by that. Whereas, any non-Latin character is going to be nearly impossible for most of the world to enter.

A particularly terrible language is Chinese where most old people can't type the characters even though they can type Latin letters. That's because you have to deliberately invest time to sit down and learn an input method which is a non-trivial endeavor that takes weeks of effort and old people just aren't going to go back to school for that.

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> Do unicode URLs actually provide any real value?

yes. Not everybody speaks english.

>Every web user must be already used to typing Latin characters because so many major websites use them.

s/web user/existing web user/

Unicode domains are one more piece required for the net to be as inclusive as possible.

On the other hand, unicode domains may lead to balkanization of the net. How would you even type in something like борщ.рф (and before you ask, you can easily translate its contents using Google Translate after entering the URL)? And everyone, just everyone in Russia is already capable of typing in stuff in ASCII. So the upside is small and diminishing (more people learn English over time and that's a beautiful thing), and the downside is the reversal of the unification effect that Internet had. I'm pretty sure it's not an obvious choice.

I should also add that the general attitude of "not everybody speaks English so we should adapt our tech to reduce the need for English" seems to imply a privilege of already knowing English. It is true that not everyone speaks English at this moment, but the right solution would be to teach everyone English as it expands horizons immensely, not to balkanize the world. Languages are not equal and English is the single most useful one. One can argue that e.g. Russian is just as good as English, but it's just not true. The amount of information available in English is immeasurably higher than in any other national language, and one should have the privilege of knowing English for some time (or being a native speaker) to forget the fact.

> How would you even type in something like борщ.рф

by clicking on the link on my search engine. Though of course, either that page is in a language I can easily type (so why then use that URL?), or otherwise, I would not have searched for that term to begin with, whether I typed it in the URL bar or in the search field.

If I'm clicking a link on a page in a script I can read, then the point is moot too.

>(more people learn English over time and that's a beautiful thing

I don't know. Giving access to people who don't (yet) speak english to me is a nobler goal than forcing people to learn english and the latin script.

If they want to learn english, that's fine. But forcing them to is being exclusive.

Yes. There's a lot more content available in english and in the end, that's what made me learn it (honestly - the sole reason I started to learn english was to be able to play the talkie version of "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis"), but this was my decision. I wasn't forced to.

Yes, knowing English is great. Everyone should learn English.

But declaring English the lingua franca means that people from other cultures will be at a perennial disadvantage vis-a-vis native speakers, or that their native language would be neglected.

There's an obvious benefit we get from everyone speaking English, but there's also a non-obvious cost to the homogenisation of cultures. Already, there are languages dying (and dead), and with every languages dies a potentially different and meaningful way to look at the world.

In any case, I'd leave such decisions to those actually affected by them. People tend to react in surprising ways to other cultures telling them what they're worth or not (c. f. "Balkanisation")

Yes. It's very odd to need to adjust your own language to fit into ASCII.

I can easily continue replacing "þ" and "ð" with "th", continue removing diacritics, but it feels like being robbed of an aspect of your language.

Maybe just limit eg. Danish characters to .dk, Icelandic characters to .is, Chinese characters to .cn etc., and leave .com ASCII?

Google is going to do just that in Chrome. Of course doing this change means that some existing domains will now stop working correctly which may or may not be ok with their owners.

The other option would be to do this based on the browser's current language preference configuration. But that means that unless your domain is in ASCII, you can never be sure how it's going to be rendered on your customer's browsers which would make IDN domains second-class compared to ASCII domains.

> A particularly terrible language is Chinese where most old people can't type the characters even though they can type Latin letters. That's because you have to deliberately invest time to sit down and learn an input method which is a non-trivial endeavor that takes weeks of effort and old people just aren't going to go back to school for that.

Is that your personal experience? Most input methods I know work by 1. knowing the Pinyin romanization of the word you want to type 2. typing it in 3. selecting the appropriate characters from a long list of candidates.

If they know the characters and Latin letters, then the only roadblock I can think of would be not knowing Pinyin. That shouldn't take weeks to learn if you already know Chinese, it's more like learning a very simple alphabet.

I see it as a very basic token of respect for other cultures, the actual costs of which in technical effort and a scammer here and there don't even register in absolute terms.

>Do unicode URLs actually provide any real value?

No. They are very very rarely used even in countries that do not use the Latin alphabet. Given the risk that phishing poses I don't think it's worth the risk.

But they're very rarely used because support for them hasn't been good. Support is still unpredictable, I run into failing URL parsers constantly.

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