-----Original Message-----All,
From: Aaron Irvine [mailto:airvine@corp.phone.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 12:38 PM
To: Karlsson Kent - keka; idn@ops.ietf.org
Subject: [idn] universal typabilityKarlsson Kent - keka wrote:
Let me note again that CIDNUC and such are unacceptable, sinceFor people who don't know a language's script, CIDNUC (UTF5, or %HH encoded UTF8) produces mild gibberish out of (regardless of how beautiful the script really is) perceived complete gibberish.
they are reencodings into ASCII that turn (for some people)
understandable names into complete gibberish, and given the QP
(and BASE64 for text) experience I have no optimism of having
That is a nonsense argument. CIDNUC and other *Transfer Encoding Syntaxes* (most often reencodings into ASCII) produce *complete gibberish* for *everyone*. UTF-8 (which is 1. not a transfer encoding syntax, and 2. will be supported essentially universally) will produce text that is completely comprehensible to *the target audience* for a particular IDN. If *you* can read/type it is completely beside the point.
Mild gibberish can be internationally recognised and typed -- i.e. anyone can get to the website's front page (and from there Accept-Language takes over). This works even from thin clients such as mobile phones.
E.g. Chinese CAN be typed on a mobile phone (even with just a 'numeric' keypad). See demo at http://www.nokia.com/phones/tutorials/7110_tutorial/cinput/index.html. Apperently several manufacturers licence the same input software (see http://www.tegic.com/). I'm sure mobile phones targeted for a particular market will have input methods for their scripts too, whether that is Thai, Devanagari, Hebrew, or whatever. In addition it's not all that uncommon to have "full" keyboards builtin to larger models of mobile phones or even to have an attachable keyboard (see e.g. http://www.ericsson.com/chatboard/europe/ [somewhat over-hipped site...; the 'chatboard' is an actual product though, available now]).
But complete gibberish can't ever (because of human limitations) be understood and typed accurately (implies a security risk BTW).
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
Rich sites may purchase two host names - their true I18N one and an ASCII transliterated one. Poorer sites would probably quote (on business cards, etc) their true I18N domain and for those who can't type/etc that they may well quote their IPv6/4 address. :-(
This is a pricing issue, which is out of scope for this WG.
Will IDN allow I18N hostnames to have ASCII transliterated equivalents (with no site owner extra cost)(worry: increased DNS load)? Should this universal typability be discussed under requirements?
A transition strategy will most likely require that there is an ASCII alias (among perhaps several other aliases), DECIDED BY A HUMAN. The last point is very important. No algorithm is going to be producing anything sensible *for the target audience*.
Sorry for repeating ad nauseam, but CIDNUC and other TESes (like the misnamed UTF-5) are totally unacceptable. Can we please concentrate on finding an actual solution?
Kind
regards
/kent
k