Re: [APTLD iname 24] Re: [idn] Proposed suggestions from Asia Pacific Top LevelDomain meeting

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 08:38 AM 3/4/00 +0800, James Seng wrote:
>The conclusion of the discussion is that IDN is very complicated in itself. We
>should not create more complication for IDN by dealing with non-alphanumeric
>ASCII too.

The latter sentence doesn't make sense to me. In all three encodings 
proposed so far (UTF-8, UTF-5, cidnuc), it would take *extra steps* to 
exclude non-alphanumeric ASCII. Thus you are adding, not reducing, 
complication with this restriction.

This doesn't mean we necessarily want to allow non-alphanumeric ASCII; we 
cannot say we are doing so to reduce complication. The same argument goes 
for "punctuation" as was discussed last week. If we say "only alphabetic 
characters, not punctuation", we add more complexity than saying "any 
character".

Certainly, some characters should be disallowed. ISO 10646 includes many 
formatting characters, for instance; those should not be allowed because a 
user seeing a domain name would never know to enter them. Spacing 
characters should be disallowed because they would bring in deep confusion 
for someone viewing a domain name.

There is a meta-requirement that the IDN be as simple to implement as 
possible. Every non-allowed character or character range fights against 
that requirement, so we should have as few as possible.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium