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

[mark.davis@us.ibm.com]

>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.

I think you mean "non-spacing characters", since otherwise you would
exclude "a-z"! I would also disagree with the sentence if changed to that,
since perfectly valid names in many languages may contain non-spacing
characters.


Mark
___
Mark Davis, IBM Center for Java Technology, Cupertino
(408) 777-5850 [fax: 5891], mark.davis@us.ibm.com, president@unicode.org
http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&addr=10275+N.+De+Anza&csz=95014



Paul Hoffman/IMC <phoffman@imc.org>@ops.ietf.org on 2000.03.03 16:57:39

Sent by:  owner-idn@ops.ietf.org


To:   idn@ops.ietf.org
cc:
Subject:  Re: [APTLD iname 24] Re: [idn] Proposed suggestions from Asia
      Pacific Top LevelDomain meeting



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