Let's keep this tangent short but, so what? It doesn't mean we need to be blinkered about what the gradual relegation of English as tech lingua franca might mean for non-anglophones. Do we really need to be in a minority to be interested in remote perspectives?
Personally I want the Internet to bring the world together, and I see IDNs as a step toward maintaining the existing segregation between nations and languages.
English is a great lingua france but there are parts of the web that are only targeted at speakers of one language. Why should they have to type strange stuff into the address bar to get there?
Ausserdem habe ich so meine Zweifel ob du mich ploetzlich verstehst nur weil ich ISO 8859-1 verwende. Man kann die fehlenden Zeichen auch umschreiben.
Google and Mozilla have both stated intentions to get rid of the address bar; the number of users that will even see IDNs is a shrinking market. Rather than "typing strange stuff into the address bar", in a year or two most people will be "typing native stuff into a search box" -- if they aren't already.
> Ausserdem habe ich so meine Zweifel ob du mich ploetzlich verstehst nur weil ich ISO 8859-1 verwende. Man kann die fehlenden Zeichen auch umschreiben.
"I also have my doubts whether you understand me suddenly just because I use ISO 8859-1. One can also rewrite the missing characters."
(Provide your own translation to the dominant language or rely on software to do it for you. That was Google's translation service.)
