By Yun Chung

Korea is now neither calm nor hermit like. Korea hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics, the 2002 FIFA World Cup with Japan, and the 2010 G20 Seoul Summit. It is now gearing up for the 2012 World Expo in May and the 2018 Winter Olympics.

One can hardly relate to Korea as the Hermit Kingdom as 82.5 percent of Koreans used the Internet in 2010. The country is now on the map.

It has accomplished a remarkable metamorphosis.

Only Korea.net, the official website of the Korean Government, has been limping along like a hermit. It has never been a convenient or user-friendly website or an intelligent one.

Korea.net has recently revamped its site. Its homepage in English has a select-language bar at the right end of the top row. Its pull-down menu is supposed to display nine languages.

Except for English and German, however, the rest appears gibberish and unintelligible. Clicking any one of the languages will only open a page with article titles almost entirely gibberish. Clicking any of the gibberish titles will open an article in whichever language that happened to have been clicked without knowing what it was. The English homepage itself has funny symbols here and there.

These browser display-errors may occur when an article was encoded with one encoding, but the web browsers, including Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, reveal sloppy programming of the article before uploading. Korea.net has not been able to fix this encoding mismatch problem for the last several weeks. Instead, it has implanted a notice at the bottom right corner of the home page. It asks the reader to set the encoding manually to UTF-8. This can be a one-time fix, not a solution. Unless one knows the notice is there and what it is about, no one will bother to open it.

Instead, Korea.net readers will leave the site when they see the unintelligible language selection, which leads only to gibberish pages.

All pages should open in the language selected automatically so that the website can be user-friendly. This is also how Korea.net used to work before it was expanded to nine languages from five.

Korea.net web pages have no "contact us" for communications between readers and webmasters or writers and editors. The greeting page by its Director Seo Kang-soo states: "Email collection prohibited." This sounds so stupid, obnoxious, and unfriendly that it should be deleted, particularly when Korea.net has no email (ok, email addresses) for anyone, including the webmaster. This is why Korea.net is a hermit website.

Seo's greeting page in Korean has propaganda, "Windows of Korea Wide Open to the World." Dear Director, you need to keep the doors open, not windows, to have open dialogue. The best way to make Korea.net friendly and transparent is to make the webmaster, writers, and director accessible by emails. In the U.S., a communication channel to President Barack Obama, including an email address, is published on the White House website. Do not be afraid of being harassed by email from the public. "Being harassed" comes with your job as a public servant! Move over, Mr. Director, if you do not want to or cannot deal with it.

Korea.net's mission is to enhance the image of Korea. Displaying gibberish pages day after day, Korea.net has brought shame to Korea. This is incredulous, totally unacceptable, and inexcusable. Seo should have never allowed this type of fiasco to happen on the official website of the Korean government. It is only wasting taxpayer's money.

Dear Director, get busy and fix the encoding problems.

The writer is a retired Korean engineer living in California. He can be reached at yunchung2@msn.com.