Re: [idn] Requirements I-D

["A. Vine" <avine@eng.sun.com>]

Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
> 
> At 12:08 PM -0700 5/15/00, A. Vine wrote:
> >no matter what standard chart of case folding you come up, _including_ the
> >existing ASCII case-folding, you will leave several languages/locales with
> >incorrect folding.
> 
> Languages/locales aren't the ones doing the folding; the DNS is. To
> be more precise, the DNS will use incorrect folding for some
> languages and locales. The only alternative is to mark every domain
> name kept in the DNS with language/locale info *and* require every
> user who is entering a domain name for resolution to say which
> language/locale the creator of that domain name used. The former is
> very, very, difficult; the latter is literally impossible. (I would
> be happy to be proven wrong on this!)
> 
> >   In addition to potentially causing problems and confusion in
> >the domain naming world, it will also serve to annoy people, committees, and
> >national standards bodies from various parts of the world.
> 
> There will not be confusion in the domain naming world. Everyone will
> be able to easily and unambiguously determine what will happen to any
> given input name after case-folding. This will certainly annoy people
> and so on; so does the lack of internationalized domain names.
> 

There will have to be rules upon registry leaving accented characters out and so
on, or checking accented characters again unaccented characters, or restricting
input to force the user to understand how something is cased in DNS.  The DNS
may happily interpret any way it chooses, but it will have an effect on the way
the data is entered in the first place.  Perhaps these restrictions can be made
clear to all users in all situations where they type in a domain name with
characters which normally share an uppercase form with another lowercase
letter.  This may just be a rendering difference if the data is properly
canonicalized.  But it is something to look at and think about.  Perhaps it is
necessary to be in the requirements.

Just FYI, there will still be folks who will be upset to see a "case-folding"
which doesn't agree with their case-folding.  I am not one of those people, so I
am not the one to explain this to.