Re: Mixing of characters

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 08:54 00/01/09 +0800, James Seng wrote:
> On Sat, 8 Jan 2000, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> > while this is not strictly a technical issue, I see difficulty with getting 
> > ICANN to accept the insertion of numerous non-ASCII domains in the root 
> > nameservers at the same time as there is a very restrictive policy for 
> > inserting ASCII domains.

I would say that this is not at all a technical issue.
What I think is most important is that somebody (not us)
think about how to handle non-ASCII country TLDs. Due to the specific
properties of various scripts, the equation
       two letters <=> country TLD
may not work that well anymore. Once each country has a TLD in the
script(s) they mainly use, ICANN will probably have loosened their
policy a bit.


> > This means that if the DNS we want to internationalize is the same as the 
> > normal DNS, it's a requirement that internationalization can occur under 
> > the ASCII top-levlel domain labels.

I think this is a requirement anyhow.


> I think this is grossly unfair. Why should the technical implementation be
> restricted by what ICANN prefer to do?

Harald is not saying that the implementation should be restricted,
but is giving one specific reason why some kind of mixing different
scripts in different labels may definitely be important.

> Beside, I remember our charter does not define who or what if any
> government bodies should take care of I18N Domain Names.

Yes, but probably that means that we have to make sure that our solution
can take into account various governig scenarios and the naming structures
that may result from it. This mean that in many ways, we cannot restrict
our system to some naming/language/script patterns.


Regards,   Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:duerst@w3.org   http://www.w3.org