Re: [idn] Requirements I-D

[James Seng <jseng@pobox.org.sg>]

On this, I tend to agree with Andrea more.

Case folding in a locale independent way is not going to work universally. It
is definately going to screw up *some* language, one way or another.

While we can claim this is a technical limitation of IDN, please understand
that the usability of IDN requires us to ensure this is to be as accurate as
possible. Domain names in certain ways has associated itself as "branding" on
the Internet and once you get into that, it get pretty sensitive on the
representation.

In addition, with locale independent folding, it might also restrict some
people to register some domain names due to this technical restriction.
dispute over this is going to be quite ugly.

At this moment, I am not exactly sure how we can do this properly in a locale
dependent way yet able to preserve [1]. But I hope people dont give up on this
issue now.

-James Seng

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.
> 
> --Paul Hoffman, Director
> --Internet Mail Consortium