RE: ace leaking (was: Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth)

["Deven Kalra" <kalra@langoo.net>]

Paul:

You have an interesting point. I can definitely speak for the Indian
scenario.

As you might know, Indian languages share a common derivation. Northern
Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit/Devanagri. Similarly southern
Indian languages share a common heritage. This is complicated by the fact
that southern Indian languages use many sanskrit words though they write
them in their own scripts.

Because of the British influence in India, almost every Indian language has
developed a romanization. Names of people and places are commonly written
both in the romanized form and the native script form. Because the same
words are used in multiple languages, the romanized forms are quite similar
if not same. For example, namaskar.com will be transliterated or romanized
in the same for in Hindi and Gujarati. Therefore, if we provide the ascii
name by default to the the Hindi namaskar.com, the gujarati will not have
any ascii
form.

I think part of the problem is that we are thinking of the problem in a very
English oriented manner. In my opinion, one of the big reasons that people
will want to get IDN is because they want their customers/users to be able
to be able to use their language. The fact that people should be able to
reach their site through ascii is a nice to have but not either a motivation
or a barrier to get the IDN.

One part of the solution will be to provide people tools to enter the data
in thier language on any platform without requiring excessive localization
or major software rehaul so they are not forced to type ascii to get to a
website if it has and IDN.

Deven
---------------
Langoo.com / Langoo.net
The Source for Multilingual Products and Services

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-idn@ops.ietf.org [mailto:owner-idn@ops.ietf.org]On Behalf Of
Paul Hoffman / IMC
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 11:29 AM
To: Marc Blanchet; idn@ops.ietf.org
Subject: Re: ace leaking (was: Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth)


At 12:10 PM -0400 7/24/01, Marc Blanchet wrote:
>I would guess the opposite (i.e. two domain names: one pure ascii
>and one full-idn (without showing the ace equivalent) ,
>but who knows the future...

That's easy for someone whose company name makes reasonable sense in
pure ASCII to say. Telling Chinese and Indian speakers that they must
register a domain name in pure ASCII is quite different. Romanization
works poorly for many languages; few Americans and Europeans realize
that.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium