There's another reason why this group isn't considering "registration": there is no registration for many names. I own the domain name imc.org, and I don't need to register with anyone if I want to resolve the name "&&&.imc.org". The IDN should say what is and is not allowed on the wire, period.
I believe we have http:// WEBMASTER_PART REGISTRATION_PART TLD /
TLD is always US-ASCII
WEBMASTER_PART should have few restrictions on it. The site owner can decide what characters are sensible. IDN need only police against a small set of disallowed character, such as @ : . / xxFFFE xxFFFF
REGISTRATION_PART is policed by registration authorities (protection
against spoofing requires this). But this part could evolve/expand
over time: now is A-Z0-9-, next year add in Latin extended A characters
and some Asian (IDN to decide which characters, and then pass this information
to the registration authories), the year after that add some more based
on experience with last year's REGISTRATION_PART and also on WEBMASTER_PART
usage and on any new characters added to Unicode. IDN need only police
against a small set of disallowed character, such as @ : . / xxFFFE xxFFFF,
and the registration authories police the rest (opening up year after year
as experience is gained).
(In addition to policing @ : . / xxFFFE xxFFFF etc, and feeding allowed
characters to registration authories, IDN considers encoding (such as double
hyphenated UTF5 maybe?) and considers matching (oeoeoe.fr to match oe{oeligature}oe.fr)
These are my rough thoughts.
Aaro.
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Aaron Irvine
mailto:airvine@corp.phone.com
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