140 isn’t properly a character count. We regard it as such because as speakers of English we stick to the ascii range. Twitter allows 140 bytes per tweet. You’d be limited to slightly fewer characters if you’re using multibyte characters (twitter expects utf-8), although at that rate you’d still be able to manage Amelia Bedelia in kanji, if not War and Peace.

I took a couple looks at the mailing list, and one thing that immediately comes to mind is, “Wow, they need Google Wave.” Everyone is copy/pasting everyone else’s emails in full, and then inserting their own annotations.
It would also be good if they could thread the list. It seems it’s only one email at a time. I’ll see if there are options.
At this moment in time, I’ve got other things to do.

The issue of Twitter’s 140-character limit being unfair to some languages is an interesting one too. Maybe we should do some research on the subject by making a number of “standard” tweets in English and asking people to translate them without regard to character limits.

Japanese is entered by activating an IME (Input Method Editor) and then just typing Latin letters; they get substituted for kanji semi-automatically if desired. If I wanted to type the word for bird (鳥), I’d hit the hotkey for activating Japanese input, then type “tori” (とり), then press space to see the menu of matching kanji (鳥 is the most common, so it’s the first).

You’re right about the kanji being available in Japanese tweets, but inflections and prepositions are handled by hiragana, and foreign words handled by katakana, and that’s where the size-advantage is lost.

Korean is interesting, because each character is an entire syllable… I haven’t benchmarked, but Chinese is the most compact I’ve seen, Korean may be second-most compact, and Japanese and English may be at rough parity, depending on the level of informality and abbreviation of the speech.

Meanwhile, pity the Germans…. ;-)

jd/adobe

Self-appointed ‘concerned’ individuals: “We PROPOSE more collaboration between the WAI and the HTML-WG”

Hixie and Ruby: “How about, as a start, um, replying to our emails?”

Self-appointed ‘concerned’ individuals: “How dare you! Must you be so arrogant?”

I don’t entirely disagree with the (admittedly rather egotastic) proposal. I do think it was sent to the wrong working group.

@Adrienne: A few points.

1) To my mind (and others) the W3C *is* the professional body you seek – it is unfortunate that WHAT WG continues to run in parallel, but there you have it. Within the W3C there are numerous groups that focus on a specific area of interest/expertise (accessibility, web fonts, RDFa, etc.), and if you feel you have contributions to make to any of those groups, please do so. By policy, most of these groups have ‘official’ channels for commentary – for example the web accessibility initiative has the Protocols and Formats Working Group: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/Overview.html who have just announced the creation of a Task Force to look at the very real issues surrounding the accessibility of the canvas element: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Jul/0562.html The real issue however is that the current editor does not feel bound to take the contributions of these expert groups with any more ‘weight’ than the average Joe off the street (with no offense to the Joes out there who may very well be qualified to comment on any particular subject)

2) Communication via listserve – yes, it might seem clunky in the world of twitter and on-line instant chat, but how else can you accommodate a diverse and global body of contributors? Many of the active participants that I communicate with (in the area of web accessibility) live in such regions as Norway, UK, Germany and Australia – all in different time-zones. Listserves provide threaded, search-able archives that allow for such asynchronous discussion: if you have a better means to ensure inclusiveness then speak up; what I (and others) abhor however is the current practice that the WHAT WG authors group uses, which is IRC – it has it’s uses, but is hardly an inclusive environment – unless of course you are a vampire and need no sleep .

If one looks at the history of other standards bodies, e.g. ANSI (founded by engineering societies) and MARC 21 (created by librarians), professional organizations played an important role in the process of creating standards. It seems that with web standards, the most influential voices are those of the browser manufacturers, who have the resources and motivation to control the standards creation process.

What if web designers had an organization like the AIGA? It might be harder then for those who currently control the working group to shrug off the proposals of individuals, if those individuals could leverage the clout & prestige of a professional organization. Such an organization could also devote resources to streamlining the avenues through which its members could participate in and influence the standards-creation process. The current system is (I think) needlessly bloated, overloaded with numerous and confusing entry points (“HTML5 WG? Or the WHAT WG?” Incubator groups?) and hampered by an archaic communication system (an email listserv, for godssake) and arcane language.

I think we’re reaching a crisis point with web standards. If this disconnect between the standards bodies and the actual users of web standards continues, we might see more designers/developers abandoning the headache altogether and relying upon proprietary (but more predictable & stable) platforms upon which to work.