This is a very anglo-centric view. As someone who belongs to a small nation, I'm very happy and grateful that I'm able to use my language on the Internet as much as possible.
But that doesn't mean domain names should, or identifiers in programming languages. Those are critical, fairly low-level technologies, and allowing all of Unicode raises significant security concerns. I strongly believe those concerns outweigh the usefulness of non-Latin characters in those contexts.
The accusation of anglocentrism is unwarranted here. Every mainstream programming language ever created has all of its keywords based on the English language, including languages like Ruby and Python whose creators aren't native English speakers. This isn't anglocentric, it's a best-effort attempt to make the language as universal as possible in the world we live in. Internationalization at this level of technology simply leads to fragmentation. Domain names and programming languages are very different from user-focused free-form web content.
Also, I disagree that domain names aren't user focused. It's the first thing you learn as a regular web user (at least that used to be the case before, now it's usually the app name).
Well, now you have. I'm not a native English speaker and I'm not from a country where English has any official status.
is that a joke? or are you really under the impression that most languages use subsets of the Latin alphabet? even English uses letters that aren't in ASCII, much less literally every other one.
Also, “Those two dots, often mistaken for an umlaut, are actually a diaeresis… Most of the English-speaking world finds the diaeresis inessential. Even Fowler, of Fowler’s “Modern English Usage,” says that the diaeresis “is in English an obsolescent symbol.””
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
The main argument against is that everybody is accustomed to the current situation and knows that when a brand contains diacritic marks, they should be removed when entering URL. If IDN is introduced, it would be confusing as some would use ASCII version, some IDN version, while most would just buy two domains instead of one.
But it doesn't, so that's an irrelevant hypothetical.
Which is why almost every institution everywhere uses kilometers or miles to measure distances, not parasangs or barids.
Well, the way the world works created IDN and Unicode identifiers in languages. How about that?
Wait, IDNs exist, they are "the way the world works". You are arguing that they should not exist, because you don't have a use for them and they inconvenience you. How can you justify your desire for the world to work differently by saying that it's "the way the world works"?
Are palindromes they key?
Examples of Issues Found with RFC 3454
4.1. Dhivehi
Dhivehi, the official language of the Maldives, is written with the
Thaana script. This script displays some of the characteristics of
the Arabic script, including its directional properties, and the
indication of vowels by the diacritical marking of consonantal base
characters. This marking is obligatory, and both two consecutive
vowels and syllable-final consonants are indicated with unvoiced
combining marks. Every Dhivehi word therefore ends with a combining
mark.Perhaps with current level and awareness of multi-lingualism in computer science/engineering, this whole discussions about anglocentrism in computing and possible solutions is too early to take place; very few are even aware, much less accept, that the spoken language active during a decision making affects its result for multi-lingual people.
What do you gain from IDN domain names other that nobody who doesn't speak your language can't even type or remember them? Apart from the obvious security issues mentioned in TFA. Same goes for handles or ids. Don't allow non-ascii for usernames to avoid scams. If you insist, have a separate display name that's displayed alongside.
That people who do speak the language can type them?
Every keyboard layout in existence for languages not based on the latin alphabet has a trivial way to switch to Latin input.
It's a reminder that we live in a shared world.
And if we start seeing more keywords in alternative scripts...
That's more improvement in strong typing, IDEs, LSP, dev containers, static analysis and a slew of related technologies. It's exhausting, but it seems a little more fair than the URL debate. Of course there will be human auditing and approval advancements there that are exploitable. But it is what it is.
As for the homograph problem mentioned in the article, that's not an anglo-centric fluff. It's an actual major problem that affects speakers of all languages. It hinders the ability of people to reliably type or recognize domain names. That's going to cost some people their life savings.
Overall, IDNs would cause more harm than good by making URLs unreliable. It would just serve to empower search engines.
Also with a push from Google (and Firefox too) most users no longer type URLs - they enter a search query and go to a site from search result. I don't like this trend but site names become increasingly invisible for users.
Also, Firefox sadly has all individual countries TLDs enabled by default if I enable the whitelist. It should be the opposite.