Re: [idn] Report from the ACE design team

[liana.ydisg@juno.com]

>From ishisone@sra.co.jp

> Could you please give some example of a name of
> a Japanese organization with a long string of characters? (actually the
> number of characters in Japanese and a rough translation will suffice,
> since I cannot read Japanese).

Sure.  I looked around and found two examples.  Both names exceed 15
characters and DUDE cannot encode them, but other more space efficient
ACEs can.

1. JPNIC (the registry of .jp domain)
JPNIC's official name consists of 25 characters.  Most of the characters
are phonograms (Katakana), though.

  U+793E U+56E3 U+6CD5 U+4EBA U+65E5 U+672C U+30CD U+30C3 U+30C8 \
  U+30EF U+30FC U+30AF U+30A4 U+30F3 U+30D5 U+30A9 U+30E1 U+30FC \
  U+30B7 U+30E7 U+30F3 U+30BB U+30F3 U+30BF U+30FC

2. A helth-insurance organization in Tokyo
This name also contains a few phonograms, but most are ideograms.

  U+6771 U+4EAC U+90FD U+60C5 U+5831 U+30B5 U+30FC U+30D3 U+30B9 \
  U+7523 U+696D U+5065 U+5EB7 U+4FDD U+967A U+7D44 U+5408

						   -- ishisone@sra.co.jp

My commend:

The DUDE has a universal appeal for most languages in UNICODE,
but disregards the readability for people not reading the local script 
or do not have local script support, where most international working
people really need.  For example, an English speaker do not have 
Chinese support on his computer, but receives mails from a few 
Chinese e-mail servers, and has no option to tell where the e-mail comes 
 from besides the .cn country code.   In Chinese, a typical name of a 
company comsists the name of its province, its city, its county or
district, 
its Xiang, or/and its individual brand name, its village name, its
genentic 
business and its corporation type.  It is 10 -13 characters long for well

known entities, and 12 - 15 as the necessary length for more localized 
names as current computerization status concerns.  To say 15 
characters is enough is a strech, beause its village size is from 4 
persons in Tibet to several thousands residents in a populated area.  
There is no problem with DUDE in general, but such a tangled email 
header of 1000 companies will give the international worker a real 
headache.

However, using standard StepCode for IDN such a name can be 
phoneticly supported.  For example: 
Liaoning22Shenyang32Nanhu22Datan22Xiehe22YiYuan14
with 50 octets for a hospital.  For a grade school e-mail address,
we need another two characters for sure and reachs the limit of 
DUDE.  With phrasal StepCode by consider the address as one 
unit for IDN, this can be 
LiaoningShenyangNanhuDatanXieheYiYuan-12 in 27 octets. 
 
I suggest the WG to work out and recommend a standarded 
StepCode configuration for IDN to complement DUDE, such 
that DUDE will be the default ACE with a higher compression rate 
in a general and StepCode be the language tagged ACE for users 
who need  
1. the readability of e-mail addresses;
2. localized compression scheme;
3. the option to specify logos or trademarks outside UNICODE 
standard.

If we can have a consensus on support another ACE to address
the above needs, I would support DUDE. 

Liana