Re: [idn] call for comments for REORDERING

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

At 02:05 01/10/19 -0400, DougEwell2@cs.com wrote:
>In a message dated 2001-10-18 21:33:55 Pacific Daylight Time,
>lsb@postel.co.kr writes:
>
> >  1) saturations in TLD namespaces would require longer names for which
> >      REORDERING is designed to give greater benefits/compression ratio.
>
>Is it not the case that logographic/ideographic writing systems such as Han
>and the syllable-oriented Unicode encoding of Hangul, with their large
>numbers of characters, convey more information per character than alphabetic
>scripts?

Very much so, of course.

>How long, conceptually, does a domain name really need to be?

That's a very subjective question, because 'real need' is very
subjective.


>I would probably have a warmer spot in my heart for these script-specific
>compression proposals if I were convinced that the users of Han and Hangul
>were somehow being cheated by not being able to register the equivalent of
>"FourthDistrictCentralProvincialLibraryBoardOfDirectors.org" as a domain name.

In various Japanese translations, I get between 14 and 18 characters.
But I think the fact that such domain names can be (and is some strange
cases even are) registered in English is rather by accident (the designers
of the internal DNS format decided to reserve 2 out of 8 bits, which leaves
6 for the label length, thus a max length of 64. If it were 5 bits, it
would be 31. That wouldn't have affected the spread of the Internet and
the Web in any way.

Regards,   Martin.