Re: [idn] Report from the ACE design team

[liana.ydisg@juno.com]

Kenw@sybase.com wrote:
 
> Assertion that there are long organization names is not a
> demonstration that there is a practical need or desire to
> register such long names.
> 
> And even if you might be able to point, perhaps, to some
> Chinese government plan to require domain name registrations
> using some bureaucratic scheme of 
> province/city/district/xiang/business-type
> naming, as Liana Ye has alluded to, that doesn't mean that people
> will actually want to use such 15 character monstrosities or
> won't demand some shorter way to deal with them. Why would people
> want to type 40 - 60 keystrokes in their input method to
> use such an IDN, when they might be able to get to the same
> place with "xyz.cn" already?
> 

Oh, you got the whole concept twisted.  It is not the Chinese 
government plan to "require", since the government
are the big guys, they already have  taken the short names.  It is the
small guys, who wants to register later and found too many name 
conflicts, they have to use province/city/district/xiang to seperate 
themselves from the big guys, if they want national exposure as
it is commonly done in the States.  

By the way, the grade school website here in the State is using the 
county/district/school name as its domain name.  For China, 
county names will have phonetic conflict, so the user has to decide
which way they want to separate themselves from the earler 
registrant.

> Further, accomodation of long names for domains is only part of the
> design criteria for an effective ACE. While good compression
> for an ACE *should* be a criterion, to provide decent handling
> of long names for all scripts, it cannot be taken as the
> overriding, all-important criterion. If you go that route,
> then you would be led to embrace the unbounded complexity of
> something like the StepCode proposal, which shortens the ASCII
> forms by using transliteration schemes, rather than a simple
> algorithm for a compressed reencoding of the character values.
> 
> --Ken
> 

Unbounded complexity?  I am sorry to give you that impression.
StepCode is a stepped scheme, each step is one iteration of
the method.  It can go as far as the anyone wants it, it is a 
recursive method.  The first step is the most simple way to encode
both for the computer as well as for the language users.  It uses
existing phonetic standards to represent a glyph.  As a programmer,
you don't need to worry about that standard, all you need to provide
is a tool to use that standard, that is allowing for language tag to
be used.  For IDN application, if you worry about complexity then
you may vote for only allow one step of StepCode to be used.  
In fact, the way I have describe earler
to combine a domain name into one phrase is a half of the 
first step and good enough for the purpose of domain name 
registration. 

Liana