Re: [idn] Report from the ACE design team

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

In die Tue, 26 Jun 2001 22:52:14 +0900
Makoto Ishisone <ishisone@sra.co.jp> scripsit:


> > When I was younger, some Japanese friend explained me that usually a single
> > ideogram is the equivalent of a word in a Latin language.
> 
> A single ideogram has a certain meaning(s) (that's what ideogram is),
> but I don't think it is an equivalent of a Latin word. 

You are right, I should have talked about a (rough) concept or idea. My fault.

> > Could you please give some example of a name of
> > a Japanese organization with a long string of characters? 
> 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

let's leave aside the fact that probably, since there are a lot of Katakana, DUDE 
could manage to encode it. I am still puzzled for a cultural difference.
If I understand it correctly, this name could be roughly seen as 
"JapaneseCenterForInternetNames". Are you hinting that people in Japan 
prefer to address it with such a long name, and not with an abbreviation?

The firm I work for is Telecom Italia Lab, for example, but we try not to use the 
long name telecomitalialab.com, and prefer the shorter tilab.com.
If this is not the case for countries which use Han-based characters, I fear 
that even other ACEs or UTF-8 are not the right solution, since the limit does
not rise significatively,

ciao ,.mau.