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Comment by noibl | Hacker News Reader

I think you're missing the significance of this change. It's not clearly stated in the announcement (in fact, nothing is) but in section 1.3 of the Applicant Guidebook[1] it shows that for the first time it will be possible to have IDN gTLDs, that is, gTLDs in any standardised script. Latin1 is gone. This is big.

Sometimes the anglocentrism (and USA-centrism) on this site worries me.

[1] http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/rfp-clean-30may11-e...

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The anglocentrism on this site is nearly entirely because the overwhelming majority of developments in the computer industry, from the Mark I to the iPad, have been created by Anglophones.

Let's keep this tangent short but, so what? It doesn't mean we need to be blinkered about what the gradual relegation of English as tech lingua franca might mean for non-anglophones. Do we really need to be in a minority to be interested in remote perspectives?

Personally I want the Internet to bring the world together, and I see IDNs as a step toward maintaining the existing segregation between nations and languages.

And to do that you force everyone to use english?

English is a great lingua france but there are parts of the web that are only targeted at speakers of one language. Why should they have to type strange stuff into the address bar to get there?

Ausserdem habe ich so meine Zweifel ob du mich ploetzlich verstehst nur weil ich ISO 8859-1 verwende. Man kann die fehlenden Zeichen auch umschreiben.

Google and Mozilla have both stated intentions to get rid of the address bar; the number of users that will even see IDNs is a shrinking market. Rather than "typing strange stuff into the address bar", in a year or two most people will be "typing native stuff into a search box" -- if they aren't already.

This move by ICANN is already irrelevant.

> Ausserdem habe ich so meine Zweifel ob du mich ploetzlich verstehst nur weil ich ISO 8859-1 verwende. Man kann die fehlenden Zeichen auch umschreiben.

"I also have my doubts whether you understand me suddenly just because I use ISO 8859-1. One can also rewrite the missing characters."

(Provide your own translation to the dominant language or rely on software to do it for you. That was Google's translation service.)

I think you missed the message.

The majority is actually not as overwhelming as it appears at first sight if you think of people like Linus Torvalds, Guido van Rossum or Bjarne Stroustrup.

BUT, I think most IT folks who are not natively anglophone have wholeheartedly embraced the english language as the lingua franca of the industry and of science in general. The practical advantages of having such a lingua franca are simply overwhelming, and I really think that any step towards localization is a step backwards for everybody.

Very good point. The development of Linux I think of as an English-speaking effort, but that's because Linus conducted all the discussion about it in English (because, as you say, English is the lingua franca of the technology world).

So I guess the actual truth is that the vast majority of technology developments have come from people who speak English (some Ruby stuff excepted), not necessarily native English speakers.

It isn't anglocentrism. It is that English is the language of science and diplomacy. If this whole crazy thing had started in the 18th or 19th centuries it would have been in French or German. If you want to communicate to the world in scientific literature, you publish in English. I think that this spilled over into technology for obvious reasons. You can argue owe the merits of this, but having a common lingua Franca (if you will) was important to bootstrap the Internet. Now that it is more commonplace, it is important to support more languages. But if we had started out supporting everything, it might not have gained traction. Or it would have balkanized and been multiple networks separated by language. (which is what we might get anyway)

I think you've missed a couple of IDN gTLDs, some launched more than a year ago, i.e. http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/111710_470000_Domain... .

They are country-code top-level domains. Currently IDNs are limited to country representations only.

The current non-IDNs are also limited.

Which makes the issue of IDNs unrelated to this discussion.

If it's not clearly stated, then perhaps people didn't miss it because of their bias but because... it wasn't clearly stated.

People can register unicode domain names (not tld) for years now. Do you know any major sites with a non-latin primary domain name?

I don't get around all that much, but the biggest one I've seen was Daring Fireball's web shortener at ✪df.ws . It was later pulled due to widespread software problems with Unicode glyph handling, with a big offender being AT&T's name servers: http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/starstruck .

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