[governance] History of multilinguism on the Internet (Was: Program for IGC at IGF

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 08:04:56PM +0200,
 Louis Pouzin <pouzin at well.com> wrote 
 a message of 42 lines which said:

> Let's recap history.

Nice. Interesting. As we say in french, some people will say that the
glass is half-empty, others will say that it is half-full. And both
are right. Your data is correct, for the most part, but mine was,
too. You say that it took a long time to be able to be multilingual on
the Internet and it is correct (and it is not over). And I insist that
saying that there was no attempt on internationalization on the
Internet before the WSIS is ridiculous. Let's see the details.

> My opinion on the progress of linguistic diversity in the internet
> is already on record:

With a lot of exaggerations. Saying that "The internet was only for
the happy few who could write their name in English." neglects the
fact that many languages which use the Latin alphabet can be written,
in a degraded form, in US-ASCII. I wrote many texts in French with
ASCII, not waiting for the WSIS to do something! This was not perfect
but it was possible.

There are also some blatant lies, such as saying that MIME was
triggered by the pressure of the Web while the first RFC on MIME was
published on june 1992, more than a year before the release of Mosaic
(http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/MosaicHistory/) and when few people
besides Tim Berners-Lee have heard about the Web (the trendy thing was
Gopher at this time).

> All commercial computers at this time featured 8-bit characters.

But there was no standard to interpret them. ISO-8859 was not defined
at this time (and of course no
Unicode). http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/characcodehist.html

> Interestingly the internet format was based on 7-bit characters,

There was never an "Internet format". this limit was only for email
(which had to be very limited because it encompassed much more than
the Internet!). Telnet and FTP never had this 7-bit limit.

> Word processors at that time allowed to produce documents more or
> less in the user's own language. Stored files used 8-bit characters,
> but not the mail.

This is again revisionism. At this time, in France, the most common
way to encode composed characters was called "Extended ASCII" and was
7-bits, with the most common composed characters replacing "useless"
characters like { or }. Printing a C source file always created nice
surprises!

> Then users resorted to a flurry of freeware, such as BinHex,
> Stuffit, uuencode, to turn their documents into ascii and mail
> them. All that required a certain amount of manual hacking, and a
> minimum of technical skill, restricting the use of internet to
> computerese. 

That was a general state of the Internet (and of computing in general)
at this time. It was not multilingual-specific. MS-DOS command-line
was regarded as user-friendly at this time.

> How long did this situation last ? TWENTY years.

Welcome to the real world. That's the time it takes to deploy new
technologies. For instance, the In-Reply-To header was specified in
RFC 822, TWENTY-FOUR YEARS ago and your mailer still does not use it
and you just broke the thread and started a new one.

> There was no technical roadblock. It was just a matter of picking a
> standard replacing a battery of similar cottage tools.

I participated in the "internationalization" of the email
infrastructure in France. A small role, people like Jean-Luc
Archimbauld, Serge Aumont or Pierre David were more important. But it
allowed me to measure what it takes to change the world. Time and
patience. Handwaving does not help.

> Eventually, in 1991 the web was born. Not in the internet milieu,
> but as an internal CERN project.

This is also quite ridiculous. What was CERN if not part of the
"Internet milieu", like all reasearch centers were?

> Web users mushroomed, attracted by the interface simplicity. 

This is simply journalistic propaganda. Web interfaces at the
beginning were complicated. Mosaic did not appear until 1994. Eudora
was out before, and introduced many email users to the world of
client-server software and graphical interfaces.

> Do you think the unilateral control of the internet by a single
> english speaking country has been fair to other languages ?

Do you think that the difficulties of technical internationalization
of the Internet have *anything* to do with the ISOC or ICANN? ICANN
did nothing for the internationalization of the Internet, true. But it
also did not take active steps against it.

So, yes, it is unfair that the root of the DNS is controlled by the
puppet of a specific government. But it has very little connection
with the multilinguism on the Internet.
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