Re: [idn] Document Status?

["Edmon Chung" <edmon@neteka.com>]

Hi Steve,

I concur with your analogy, but I think it is a transition strategy for
registries you are talking about here.  How responsible registry operators
should roll out multilingual domain names to their users, and how
responsible software providers should allow passageway for resolutions to
happen immediately.

Since this is a transitional strategy, it is not going to be the "standard"
and I think this is a very important distinction to me made.  To that end, I
have put together an I-D that is intended to be "informational"
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-dnsii-trace-01.txt) for
registries, or shall I say industry operators who actually care about the
fact that names sold work.

It talks about how a registry/DNS operator could prepare its zone to respond
positively to IDN requests sent by existing applications, while being fully
prepared for the eventual "standard".  The reason this is very important, is
that we all know that users wil attempt to access multilingual domain names
they see using their existing applications and that request will reach the
registry name servers.  It will be very irresponsible to ignore these
request, and create a negative user experience for the technically less
sophisticated public.

Anyway, my point is that while I agree to your point, I think we should make
it clear whether they are discussions on the "standard" or the "transition".
To me, the "transition" must be to allow 8bit requests to be correctly
responded to inorder to create a positive and transparent end-user
experience for multilingual domain names, regardless of the "standard", yet
driving towards it.

Edmon

PS. while the I-D has been there for sometime it has not been announced
precisely because I believe we do not wish to muddy the water between "the
standard", and a "transition strategy".




----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen Dyer" <steve@uk.com>
 > Firstly, I believe we should examine a process that deploys quickly the
> > fullest possible range of 8-bit ascii characters.
> > Many of these, especially accented characters, were sidelined by us
Anglos
> > or unnecessarily hi-jacked by operating systems (especially by Unix).
This
> > is a quick fix, but will give great benefits to the populations of
Western
> > Europe, South America, much of Africa and ex-colonies of Western
> > "Imperialist" nations in general.
>
>There is not one 8-bits character set which can be used for all the
>European languages, unless you convince many countries to change their
>default script :-)
>snip..
>So, although "Let's make the simple thing first and we'll see later
>for the complicated one" is often reasonable, it cannot work here. We
>need Unicode from the beginning (handling Unicode only is simpler than
>handling Latin-1, Latin-2 and Greek, and waiting Bulgaria to join with
>its Cyrillic alphabet).

If you deploy the fullest possible range of ASCII codes, in *practice* a
huge range of usable domains will become available. It may be that by
allowing "élève.com" you may eliminate a Bulgarian word that happens to use
exactly the same code string but it's a very long shot and results in a
happy Frenchman and an unhappy Bulgarian. At the moment they are both
unhappy, and this sort of intersect can happen right now anyway.

Regards

Steve