IDNs "The Beast Unleashed!"

[sarcle]

Imagine that, instead of being created by Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman working at CERN in Switzerland, the internet had been invented by Li Tsim, a Chinese researcher at Tsinghua university in Beijing.

Thus, the first web pages were all in Mandarin, and URLs were made up of Chinese characters. So today, every time you see a web address on an advertising hoarding, you have to spend five minutes carefully copying it down and then working out how to type it into your computer.

If this sounds like a nightmare, you can imagine how important it is to citizens of countries where the simple Latin alphabet is not used for them to surf the web using URLs in their own languages.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/ar...076285,00.html

[blastfromthepast]

[Alphamale]

I've edited this post, because on reflection, I haven't got a clue what it means!!

Admin, for us simpletons, can you please put a Defcon status on the homepage, or maybe just a traffic light... when it's all looking like bad news for us idn.com/net collectors it can be red, and green when we are all going to be trillionaires, and amber when even the likes of the great Duck and Olney are confused..

.. it seems to swing between between elation and doom every 10 minutes or so..

and err, if someone wouldn't mind telling me what colour the traffic light is at now please. time 14:15 GMT on Thursday

[thefabfive]

I believe it means:

Imagine if the internet was started by the Chinese and websites and addresses first appeared in Chinese. Many years later, while websites may provide content in English, the web address that you need to type in is still in Chinese. This scenario is what most non-English speakers face today.

IDNs to the rescue.

Definitely a green light.