Hello,
I am forwarding the following notes to this list in the hopes that someone
can
help me understand the current situation with non-ASCII characters in URLs.
As you will see, Roozbeh provided one response, and that led to further
questions
on my part. Since Roozbeh raised the issue of UTF-8, I am hoping that this
crosses over into Unicode land. Apologies if it is not appropriate for this
group.
Suzanne Topping
Localization Unlimited
----- Original Message -----
From: Suzanne Topping <stopping@rochester.rr.com>
To: www <www-international@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 12:44 PM
Subject: Prediction for non-ASCII URLs
Hello,
I've been doing some reading about handling of non-ASCII characters in URLs
as presented by Martin J. Dürst and others, and am wondering what might be a
reasonable predicted timeline for when non-ASCII URLs will become
ubiquitous? (By which I mean that that standards, technologies, etc. will
support them and handle them gracefully.)
Any thoughts on this?
Also, can you tell me what the key barriers are to handling non-ASCII
characters? Is it that existing server/router/etc. technology doesn't
provide support?
Thanks in advance for your comments.
--++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Suzanne Topping
Localization Unlimited
HERE IS ROOZBEH'S RESPONSE:
----- Original Message -----
From: Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh@sina.sharif.ac.ir>
To: Suzanne Topping <stopping@rochester.rr.com>
Cc: www <www-international@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: Prediction for non-ASCII URLs
On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Suzanne Topping wrote:
> I've been doing some reading about handling of non-ASCII characters in
URLs
> as presented by Martin J. Dürst and others, and am wondering what might be
a
> reasonable predicted timeline for when non-ASCII URLs will become
> ubiquitous? (By which I mean that that standards, technologies, etc. will
> support them and handle them gracefully.)
Internet Explorer 5 already uses that for default. If you use any
non-ASCII characters in the URL, it will convert it to UTF-8 and %-encode
it. Perhaps Microsoft Internet Information Server also does that.
--Roozbeh
HERE ARE MY ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS:
----- Original Message -----
From: Suzanne Topping <stopping@rochester.rr.com>
To: www <www-international@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, January 10, 2000 4:20 PM
Subject: Re: Prediction for non-ASCII URLs
> Thanks for this response Roozbeh.
>
> Pardon my ignorance on this subject, but can you tell me how this ends up
> impacting the user? Is it transparent? For example, if a user enters a URL
> which includes Japanese characters, does the browser display the converted
> URL in the address it displays from then on? Or is this converting and
> encoding handled behind the scenes, and the display remains in Japanese?
>
> My point is that if the display is converted straight away, then the user
> impact is still pretty significant. Lets say that they enter the
> Japanese-friendly URL, which gets immediately converted and displayed
using
> the % encoding, and then they go down a few levels and want to capture
what
> the new URL is. If the display now contains the whole huge string of
> converted characters, the user is stuck with an unwieldy URL.
>
> But perhaps this is a processing issue rather than a display issue.
>
> Thanks again for any help you can give me in understanding how this is
> handled.
>
> Suzanne Topping
> Localization Unlimited
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