[idn] Looking for a little clarification about timelines on multilingual domain names

["Robert" <robert@chalmers.com.au>]

I have perpaps missed some discussion here, with all the other areas being
talked about, but I wonder if someone had any idea of when we might actually
see the ability to use multilingual character sets in BIND and other areas.
 I know it's still in the planning stages, but will it likely be 1 year
away? 2 years? 3? never?

I ask because Verisign are bringing another testbed online, for a range of
character sets. Arabic, French, Vietnamese and so on, and really wonder if
the cart is not pushing the horse here - or is development really far enough
advanced that we can expect to see the ability to resolve domain names in
Chinese for example, sometime soon?

thanks, and sorry if this is the wrong forum.

Robert