RE: [idn] UTC feedback

[François Yergeau <yergeau@alis.com>]

Marc Blanchet wrote:
> At/À 10:44 2000-08-19 -0700, Mark Davis you wrote/vous écriviez:
> >You are right: the list is quite short: simply the Turkish
> i. French and
> >a few other languages may strip accents from uppercase,
>
> depends on where you are (back on localisation, ...). Some
> french speaking countries use different rules for casing.

Not really true.  The French case (no pun intended) is being way overblown
in this thread, I'm afraid.

Fact: nowhere is there a rule that capitals should be de-accented in French.
This can be seen by cracking open *any* French-language dictionary and
seeing that all entries are in all-caps and fully accented.  Consulting
newspapers, magazines and books from any French locale will also show large
amounts of accented capitals.

But: consulting French newspapers etc. will also reveal large amounts of
de-accented capitals (amounts that do vary with the locale), showing that
unaccented capitals are considered acceptable.

So the rule is that there is no rule, but it is fairly widely accepted that
capitals can be de-accented in all-caps titles, signs and the like.  IMHO
this doesn't create any requirement for the DNS to support a purported
equivalence between accented and unaccented capitals, even in a French
locale.  If somebody insists that their domain name be recognized in both
forms, they can do as Mark suggests:

> >Moreover, there is a workaround for them:
> >register 2 names (with and without accents).

To which Marc objects:
> well, then if you have 10 accented characters, you have to
> register every combination...

I don't think so.  When people drop accents in a word, they drop them all.
I don't recall ever seeing a partially accented all-caps word. (In fairness,
there *is* a fairly widespread habit, for æsthetic reasons, of not accenting
the single-letter preposition "À" in an all-caps setting, even when all
other words are correctly accented). Furthermore, as has already been
mentioned here, people are already used to
somefunnyrestrictionsonnamesinthe.dns, it would not be hard to understand
that it's either fully accented or not at all (or stick to lowercase, which
is always accented).

Conclusion: forget about special-casing French, there is no valid
requirement.

--
François Yergeau