Re: <nettime> Asia and domain names, etc. ( {AT} )

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer {AT} btinternet.com>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 03:34:05AM +0900, david {AT} 2dk.net wrote:
> The question of 'chinese' is much more complicated, and certainly
> chauvinistic. [...]  In all cases they are double-byte characters,
> and need to be encoded first to be sent over the single-byte (roman
> character) based networks of the 'wired' network world. The encoding
> systems are also diverse. (There are debates within each of these
> nations about uniform encoding, much less the kind of problems that
> show up when databasing across cultures) Of course the Japanese
> encoding methods can not be imposed upon the Koreans, PRC and ROC
> and more than the PRC's abbreviated characters can be used in
> Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

I would hope that any international solution would involve Unicode
(http://www.unicode.org), which, after all, follows an international
standard, ISO 10646 (http://anubis.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/), and neatly
supports all the languages you mention.  It seems to be nearly
universally supported now on computer systems made in the West; I'd be
interested to know to what extent it's been adopted in Asia.

-- 
Benjamin Geer
http://www.btinternet.com/~amisuk/bg

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo {AT} bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime {AT} bbs.thing.net