[idn] Re: [idn-nameprep] Re: ZWNJ (was: Re: Just send UTF-8with nameprep (was: RE: [idn]Reality Check))

[John C Klensin <klensin@research.att.com>]

--On Friday, 27 July, 2001 15:13 +0430 Roozbeh Pournader
<roozbeh@sharif.edu> wrote:

> Other solutions:
> 
> 1. Disallow ZWNJ: bad. I should then use a hyphen between
> Roozbeh and Pournader, which I don't like.

Of course, what seems to me, not knowing Arabic, to be a near
equivalent, a space between words, is disallowed in the current
naming rules and always has been.  Hence, if "Joes Pizza" goes
into the DNS, it goes in either as "joespizza" or "joes-pizza".
No other options.  I think this situation should be improved for
both Arabic and English, and all other languages where it is
relevant, but it seems to me that the perceived requirement makes
another "not in the DNS" argument.


> 3. Rip ZWNJ in nameprep, but also have some DNS (or WHOIS)
> mechanism to get to the non-nameprepped name: great. This way
> any protocol can get to the original name if it wants.
> 2. Allow ZWNJ in names: worse. Someone will put a ZWNJ between
> two letters that do not join (like Reh and Alef), leading to no
> difference in shape, by a difference in resolving.

> I want to recommend the third option. How this may happen, I
> don't know. But this can be considered a reason for having the
> reverse mechanism in place, which was the subject of the thread
> I replied to.

Well, to use my silly example again, we have had mechamisms for
putting "Joes Pizza" in whois since the beginning, even if it
points to a domain containing joespizza.  If that meets your
needs, I suggest you want to cover the whois BOF at IETF, but
that this is not an IDN problem.   If you want to be able to
access the information automatically, when names are displayed to
users, whois is too slow and you have a number of interesting
database and coordination problems, none of which appear to be in
the scope of the IDN WG.

    john