Re: Localization issues: (WAS alpha v0.2)

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

Thanks for bringing up this problem, Olafur...

At 09:45 PM 1/26/00 -0500, Olafur Gudmundsson wrote:

<big snip>

>We have choices such as
>        limited but universal naming 
>        rich but localized naming. 

We need to provide for both choices...

>Both can be supported, BUT we may end up with a system where two domain names
>are needed, one from each choice. Thus if I want to use the domain 
>"ÓGuð.com" as my main domain, but that may not be universally expressable.  
>I may need to include on my billboards and business cards the domain name
>"ogud202.com" which is universal.  "ogud202.com" may only be a DNAME to 
>"ÓGuð.com" but that allows people that want to reach my site but do not
>know how to or can not write Icelandic. 
>

This is right on target as far as .NU Domain's implementation of Local
Language domain names goes.

Can this fit into the "requirements" agenda for this WG? 

It's the number one issue for .NU Domain as we implement Local Language
support worldwide. 

The .NU domain name registration system requires that any customer who
wants to use our NUBIND service to register a Local Language domain name
must also register an ASCII .NU domain name, which is conjoined to the
Local Language name. An example would be domain.nu and domän.nu, although
it is not required that the names be this closely related at all - only
that one of them be ASCII. 

We will likely let customers add any number of different Local Language
domain names to a single ASCII one, using any number of different character
sets (so International companies can register several different versions of
their domain name using various language's character sets). In effect, a
single registration allows multiple character-set versions of a domain name
to point to the same URL, email address, etc. 

Sorry for going into implementation details, but it's important to consider
how all this will actually work at the registration point and for end
users. And solving the accessibility problem of URLs and email addresses
that use Japanese Shift-JIS, for example, to users in the US using ASCII or
Europe using ISO-8859-1, is one of those implementation problems that
should be solved in the requirements, I'd say. The goal being to avoid
segmenting the Internet.

That's what "standards" are supposed to do, right? <smile>

Bill Semich
.NU Domain



Bill Semich
President and Founder
.NU Domain Ltd
http://whats.nu
bill@mail.nic.nu