Re: [idn] Report from the ACE design team

[Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>]

ishisone@sra.co.jp wrote:

> Maurizio Codogno <mau@beatles.cselt.it> 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.

> 
> > 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

25 characters long, and would probably be too long for most of the
other ACE's, too, right?

> 
> 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

Tookyooto joohoo saabisu sangyoo kenkoo hooken kumiai

"Tokyo City Information Service Industrial Health Insurance Association"

There is, of course, some question whether organizations with such
long names would be looking to register the complete name as an IDN,
in any case. I don't know about this particular one, of course, but
many organizations with very long official names regularly abbreviate
them for internal and external use, simply because an expression like
"Tookyooto joohoo saabisu sangyoo kenkoo hooken kumiai" is too much of
a mouthful for practical use, anyway. And count up, for a typical
Japanese input method, how many keystrokes it would take to input
this -- not practical for a domain name on that criterion either.

Note that the equivalent English:

Tokyo_City_Information_Service_Industrial_Health_Insurance_Association.jp

would be 70 characters long and too long for a domain name, too!

Other comparable English examples:

American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine

   uses: acoem.org

New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health

   uses: nycosh.org

Metropolitan Safety Council of the Greater New Orleans Area

   uses: metrosafety.org

And the exception that proves the rule:

Partner's Occupational Medical Services Ltd

   uses: partnersoccupationalmedicalservices.com   (ick!)

--Ken