Re: one-language solution

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

At 09:38 00/01/24 +0800, James Seng wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> First of all, I agreed with Paul assesment of how different language/encodings
> system will be horrible. It is the same reason why a MIME type approach is not
> viable as I tried to explain again and again. But before we go into such
> detail discussion of various possible implementation, lets stay on the
> requirement doc.
> 
> I asked about one-language solutions because I know of many attempts to do a
> localized DNS. Localized DNS in the sense that they make the DNS 8-bit cleans
> and then used localized encoding in the zones. This is probably the simpliest
> and most obvious solution but of course it has a *lot* of problems.

I see. Calling them localized DNS may be okay. Calling them one-language
DNS is confusing, because language is not really the issue.


> One of which is interoperability, ie how do we ensure a ISO-2022-JP DNS able
> to interoperable with EUC-JP DNS, or GB DNS and BIG5 DNS. How do the zone file
> match, how to get unified results etc.

These are experiments that just went the short path. The sooner we come
out with something that clearly defines a standard, the less danger
for those intermediate solutions to persist. As your work in Singapore
has shown, it is indeed possible to use an intermediate resolver/proxy
to deal with some encoding issues, but if we ever are going to describe
this, I think it should be done in terms of how to move to a worldwide
solution as quickly and smoothly as possible, and not in terms of how
these things can stay around for as long as possible. We definitely
do not have a requirement to guarantee that any of the current
implementations, be it on local dns or on how browsers treat
i18n names, continue working. If we happen to figure out that
what they do is most reasonable anyway, or we can show them
a way to converge, that's a plus, but not a must.


Regards,   Martin.


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