為什么網(wǎng)址大部分都是英文的？

Why are Web addresses in English?

為什么網(wǎng)址都是英文?

The short answer: Web addresses are in English because the people who developed the standards for Web addresses were, for the most part, English-speaking Americans.

簡短一點(diǎn)的答案如下：因?yàn)殚_發(fā)互聯(lián)網(wǎng)標(biāo)準(zhǔn)的，大部分都是講英文的美國人。

The longer answer: In the earliest days of the Internet, the only way to connect with a remote computer was to provide its unique IP address, a long string of digits such as 165.254.202.218. But in 1983, as the number of computers on the network continued to grow, the University of Wisconsin developed the Domain Name System (DNS), which maps numeric IP addresses to more easily remembered domain names like howstuffworks.com.

但更為詳盡一點(diǎn)的答案是: 在互聯(lián)網(wǎng)誕生之初, 與遠(yuǎn)程計(jì)算機(jī)連接的唯一途徑是其唯一的IP 地址,也就是一長串?dāng)?shù)字,如165.254.202.218。但是到了1983年, 隨著計(jì)算機(jī)數(shù)量的持續(xù)增長, 威斯康星大學(xué)麥迪遜分校開發(fā)了域名系統(tǒng)(DNS)。該系統(tǒng)將數(shù)字IP地址映射到了人們更容易記住的域名,

In 1990, British scientist (and English speaker) Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and by 1992, more than one million computers were connected, most of them in the United States [source: Computer History Museum]. In 1994, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards organization made up of representatives from several U.S. government agencies, published a set of standards for Web addresses, which it called Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs [sources: Berners-Lee, Internet Society, Ishida].

1990年, 英國科學(xué)家(當(dāng)然也是以英語為母語了)蒂姆 · 伯納斯-李發(fā)明了萬維網(wǎng)。到1992年, 已有超過一百萬臺計(jì)算機(jī)實(shí)現(xiàn)互聯(lián),其中大部分計(jì)算機(jī)都在美國。在1994年的時(shí)候, 幾個(gè)由美國政府機(jī)構(gòu)代表組成的一個(gè)標(biāo)準(zhǔn)組織——國際互聯(lián)網(wǎng)工程任務(wù)組(IETF)發(fā)布了一系列的網(wǎng)址標(biāo)準(zhǔn), 并稱之為統(tǒng)一資源定位器, 即我們現(xiàn)在所熟知的URL。

To make Web addresses easy to read, write, type and remember, the IETF restricted URLs to a small number of characters, namely the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English (or Latin) alphabet, the digits 0 through 9 and a few symbols [source: Berners-Lee]. The allowable characters are based on the American Standard Code for Information Exchange, better known as the US-ASCII character set, which was developed in the United States and first published in 1963.

為了方便網(wǎng)址的讀寫與記憶, IETF規(guī)定，URL只能限制在較少的字符以內(nèi)。這些字符由英文的大寫字母和小寫字母(或拉丁文)、數(shù)字0到9和一些符號組成。這些字符都是以美國信息交換標(biāo)準(zhǔn)代碼為基礎(chǔ)的,也就是美國ASCII字符集。該字符集是在美國開發(fā)的,并于1963年首次出版。

This all worked out fine for English-speaking countries, but as of 2009, more than half of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide spoke a language with a character set other than the English (or Latin) alphabet [source: Whitney]. To understand what using the Web is like for those individuals, imagine that you have to navigate the Web using only Arabic. The content on your favorite sites is still in English, but the Web address for every site you use is made up of completely unfamiliar characters that may not even be found on your keyboard [source: Ishida]. That scenario, in reverse, is essentially what the Internet experience has been like for Web users who read and write using not only another language, but an entirely different alphabet or set of characters. (Visit a website like Egypt's el-balad.com, for example, and the distinction between the site content, which is entirely in Arabic, and the Web address, which uses only English characters, becomes immediately clear.)

這一切對英語國家來說都很友好, 但截至2009年, 全世界16億互聯(lián)網(wǎng)用戶中有超過一半的人使用了除英語(或拉丁語)字母以外的另一種基于不同字符集的語言。如果你想體驗(yàn)一下這是什么感覺，不妨想象一下你必須用阿拉伯語來定位并瀏覽網(wǎng)頁。雖然你最喜歡的網(wǎng)站上的內(nèi)容仍然是英文的, 但是你的訪問過的每一個(gè)網(wǎng)站的網(wǎng)址都是由完全陌生的字符組成的, 甚至還可能你在鍵盤上根本找不到這些字符。相反，對于那些不用英文甚至用的字符集也與一般人完全不同的用戶來說，體驗(yàn)就是如此(比如你要訪問埃及的 el-balad.com 這樣的網(wǎng)站,它的網(wǎng)站內(nèi)容與網(wǎng)址使用的語言有所區(qū)別。雖然內(nèi)容完全是拉丁文，但網(wǎng)址還是英文——這樣一切都變的清晰明白起來)。

Given the growing number of non-English users online, it may come as no surprise that English Web addresses are no longer the law of the land. In 2009, ICANN, the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that regulates domain names on the Internet, approved the use of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), meaning that Web addresses would be able to contain non-English characters like Chinese, Korean, Arabic or Cyrillic script [sources: Arthur, ICANN].

而現(xiàn)在，鑒于網(wǎng)上非英語用戶的數(shù)量不斷增加, 如果有一天英文網(wǎng)址表示法不再是這個(gè)領(lǐng)域的唯一標(biāo)準(zhǔn)，我們應(yīng)該也不會感到那么意外了。2009年,ICANN(美國一個(gè)負(fù)責(zé)管理域名的非盈利組織)批準(zhǔn)使用國際化域名, 這意味著網(wǎng)址將能夠包含非英文字符了, 如中文、韓文、阿拉伯文或西里爾字母，都有可能。