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Re: [idn] Requirements I-D
- To: idn@ops.ietf.org
- Subject: Re: [idn] Requirements I-D
- From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>
- Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 14:16:52 -0700
- Delivery-date: Tue, 16 May 2000 14:19:03 -0700
- Envelope-to: idn-data@psg.com
>On the other hand, this does not works well, for example, when you send [c-T]
>to someone else with an English OS and the resolver there will treat [c] as
>[c-E] instead.
Precisely. What you are requiring is that the name that the user
enters *has* to be for their own locale. What if a message was sent
by an American to a Turk? You will get the wrong result. Or, as Mark
points out, a user sees the domain name on a billboard. The
resolution will be different depending on the locale settings on that
person's computer. If they are travelling... I think you can see the
problem.
>So another solution is probably to encode locale info into the name, e.g.
>SI[T]NG.COM or SI[E]NG.COM. (or some forms..). This means that SI[T]NG.COM and
>SI[E]NG.COM are always uniquely different and thus there is no confusion. And
>it meets R[1] perfectly too. It is possible that the the client will strip
>away the [E] and [T] and displaying only SING.COM. But that is an issue for
>the client, not for this WG. (Another way to look at this is to presume we
>have two different codepoint for I, one for English and one for Turkish).
The above paragraph misses a *huge* issue, namely users entering
domain names on their own, not clicking on a link that was prepared
by the domain name owner. If you require localization info to be
stored as SI[T]NG.COM or SI[E]NG.COM (or even [T]SING.COM and
[E]SING.COM), a user typing in a domain name will get "no such host"
unless they enter the [E] or [T]. By looking at the domain name on
the screen or on a billboard, you must guess whether a name has
locale info *and* guess what that locale info is. A Chinese or
Japanese person is as unlikely to get that correct for SING.COM as an
American or a Turk is guessing about whether names with Han
characters in them have locales in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or China.
Stated more simply, if names are stored in the DNS with locale info,
then every user must know the locale of the names in order to match
correctly. This is an impossible burden for us to put on Internet
users of any nationality. It is also a gigantic security hole because
end users will have no idea where they will go if they enter names
with the wrong locale. The statement that "this is an issue for the
client, not for this WG" is a cop-out. The whole reason we are doing
the IDN is for end users around the world.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium