Re: [idn] Report from the ACE design team

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 1:32 AM +0900 6/26/01, Makoto Ishisone wrote:
>The following points are my main concern:
>
>1) Is 14-15 character is enough?
>    At least for Japanese domain names, name of a company or an
>    organization is sometimes quite long.  My question is whether the
>    maximum of 14-15 character name for CJK is enough or not.

There is an assumption in those statements, which is that a Japanese 
or Chinese company with a very long name would need a DNS name that 
is as long as their very long name. As we have discussed on this list 
many times, companies and organizations with "difficult" names (such 
as very long or hard to remember) often would prefer to use shorter 
domain names that are more useful to end users. These might be 
abbreviations or pseudonyms, but the result is the same: a domain 
name that end users can transcribe more easily. So, the question of 
maximum 15 characters is not "are there names that are this long" 
because certainly there are (just as there are European company names 
that are too long for any ACE encoding), but "are there names that 
this long that people would actually want end users to enter". This, 
of course, is a judgement call.

>2) Potential migration problem

I agree with the others who have said that this should not be an 
issue. If we try to balance with RACE, we must also balance with all 
the other pre-standard encodings, some of which can handle CJK names 
that are longer than any ACE could possibly achieve.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium