Dear StG,

It is pretty simple. Just imagine if the Chinese had invented the internet and you wanted access to the OLO site. While you could type in onlineopinion in english script you would have to know Chinese for com and au.

The same if you were greek or russian.

I don't know how many of you access OLO through your mobile phone but I do, just to read not to contribute. Especially the forum which google strips down to plain text for mobile use so it uses very little of the very expensive bandwidth.

It gives me a chance to catch up with discussions while travelling.

Well this week some of the test has been coming up with Chinese characters. Not much to go on but I am assuming some form of testing is occurring.

Has anyone else experienced the same?

As to the proposed changes I think we will become even more reliant on google especially their translation capabilities but it is a fair move.

examinator wrote 3 November 2009 8:40:12 AM:

>... ICANN ... internet addresses ... Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic ...

There will be some difficulties with allowing other scripts, but these can be lived with. The implementation chosen may also create some opportunities for scammers to play tricks with the way the non-Latn script is represented.

It is impressive that ICANN managed o get through the complex international politics involved. In 2001 I attended the Internet Global Summit, where some of the politics played out: http://www.tomw.net.au/2001/inet/

As with the Unicode, which was supposed to create a level playing field for all the world's scripts, Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) adopted by ICANN, still has bias making it easier to use with Latin scripts. The non-Latin web addresses will be represented in ASCII characters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name#Internationalizing_Domain_Names_in_Applications

ps: UTF-8, the most common Unicode encoding has ASCII built in, giving English speakers an advantage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

csteele: "I don't know how many of you access OLO through your mobile phone but I do"

I do the same thing.

It is a wild guess on my part, but I don't think these non-latin scripts are going to cause me much trouble. Web pages with non-latin URL's are almost certainly not going to be in English. In fact, they probably aren't even going to be a European language. That makes them utterly useless to me. So the fact that entering the ideograms for some East Asian language on a normal keyboard requires something near a PhD to master won't matter - I won't be entering them. In fact, it is probably an advantage. If I see a non-latin URL, I won't waste time clicking on it.

It will be interesting to see how much these non-latin scripts will be used. It was just dumb luck that our alphabet is so computer friendly - meaning it is easy to type. (The Arabs were similarly lucky). But it is, and I can't help but wonder if there will be a lot of resistance to using a language that is hard to type for something that is typed rather frequently - URL's. In fact the Japanese now use romaji, a translation of the Japanese language into the Latin character set for most computer work. Learning romaji has been compulsory in Japanese schools for decades. I can't help but wonder if the traditional Japanese idographic script will die out over the generations.

csteele,

Ah k, thank you.

In my view it is international politically based due to resistance of the NWO. United Nations controlled that is.
The decision to open a new system for US government only with some excess for corporations who have a hand in US government's till and elections.
Therefore websites that promote resistance wont be able to resist NWO anymore.
Just wait what the Copenhagen meeting brings with our own PM being a signature to it's rules.

eftfnc: "In my view it is international politically based due to resistance of the NWO."

*twitch*