Stop me if I've misunderstood...

Elisabeth Blanconil eblanconil at gmail.com
Fri Jul 10 19:15:47 CEST 2009


2009/7/10 Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org>:
> On 10/07/09 13:03, Elisabeth Blanconil wrote:
>>
>> In not consider a proper support of the French language
>> orthotypography and semiotic, then in personnally challenging its
>> participating French users, this WG has forced them to show that in
>> the French language case this could be worked out differently.
>
> To clarify: your claim is that the vast majority of French Internet users,
> despite all their experience of the internet and domain names up to now,
> would *not* be confused if they were to find that Éxample.com and
> éxample.com go to different websites owned by different people?


In this particular case they would take it for a funy US trade mark as
the proper French spelling is "exemple" and takes no accent.

There are different questions in your question.

They are confused and hurt by the _current_ situation where a French
word cannot just be copied and pasted as a domain name due to accents.
They also are confused when "State" and "status" are spelled the same
due to the lack of majuscule support (Etat and état). etc. However
they do survive.

The same as they do survive to the inability on a French keyboard to
type accentuated capitals (this problem does not exist in Quebec) (yet
statistics shows that they use more and more accentuated capitals -
not to confuse with majuscules as Unicode does).

However, to survive does not mean to be happy. Everyone would see the
advantage to be able to type domain names in French rather than in
Franglish. How would we will do it is something people will decide,
after a debate withing, among, with the different involved NICs.
"projet.fra" is among others to test, and to help other languages
testing, that point. The only thing we know is we need this
possibility for the Intersem and we want to be free to chose the way
we use it.

The very basis of this debate can be found in two places:
- http://franceatlarge.org/wiki/WG-IDNABIS_:_Is_IDNA_to_be_an_ML-DNS
- http://iucg.org/wiki/IDNA:_Internationalized_Domain_Names_in_Applications

Elisabeth Blanconil


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