Re: [idn] A question about the display of decoded IDNs

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Yves Arrouye <yves@realnames.com> wrote:

> I wondered how applications in Asia will be able to pick the correct
> glyphs for display of some characters?

I imagine they will use the font preferences and/or language preferences
set by the user.  So a Chinese user looking at a Japanese domain name
might see Chinese-style glyphs instead of Japanese-style glyphs,
but that's no big deal; the user will still be able to remember the
characters, and type them in later from memory, and tell someone else
over the phone what to type.

> Will IDN support the upcoming tag characters U+E0000-U+E007F when
> Unicode 3.1 will be released?

No.  (I don't mean to speak for everyone, but I think there's consensus
on this point.)  Today's non-internationalized ASCII domain names do not
contain tags specifying typeface, or ligatures, or language, or which
style of lowercase g to use:

    @@@@@ @@    @@@@@@@
   @@   @@     @@    @@
   @@   @@     @@    @@
    @@@@@      @@    @@
   @@           @@@@@@@
   @@@@@@@@          @@
  @@      @@   @@    @@
   @@@@@@@@     @@@@@@

A domain name is not a document, it's an identifier.  It must be
possible not only to look at it, but to type it in, and speak it.
If the identifier for a domain consisted of not just a sequence of
characters, but also the particular style with which each character was
drawn, it would be much harder to remember, speak, and type the domain
name with sufficient precision.

When you write domain names in documents, you can tag them to your
heart's content.  But in mail headers, or in the Location field of a web
browser, it would be way more trouble than it's worth.

AMC