Re: [idn] Requirements I-D

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

>On the other hand, this does not works well, for example, when you send [c-T]
>to someone else with an English OS and the resolver there will treat [c] as
>[c-E] instead.

Precisely. What you are requiring is that the name that the user 
enters *has* to be for their own locale. What if a message was sent 
by an American to a Turk? You will get the wrong result. Or, as Mark 
points out, a user sees the domain name on a billboard. The 
resolution will be different depending on the locale settings on that 
person's computer. If they are travelling... I think you can see the 
problem.

>So another solution is probably to encode locale info into the name, e.g.
>SI[T]NG.COM or SI[E]NG.COM. (or some forms..). This means that SI[T]NG.COM and
>SI[E]NG.COM are always uniquely different and thus there is no confusion. And
>it meets R[1] perfectly too. It is possible that the the client will strip
>away the [E] and [T] and displaying only SING.COM. But that is an issue for
>the client, not for this WG. (Another way to look at this is to presume we
>have two different codepoint for I, one for English and one for Turkish).

The above paragraph misses a *huge* issue, namely users entering 
domain names on their own, not clicking on a link that was prepared 
by the domain name owner. If you require localization info to be 
stored as SI[T]NG.COM or SI[E]NG.COM (or even [T]SING.COM and 
[E]SING.COM), a user typing in a domain name will get "no such host" 
unless they enter the [E] or [T]. By looking at the domain name on 
the screen or on a billboard, you must guess whether a name has 
locale info *and* guess what that locale info is. A Chinese or 
Japanese person is as unlikely to get that correct for SING.COM as an 
American or a Turk is guessing about whether names with Han 
characters in them have locales in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or China.

Stated more simply, if names are stored in the DNS with locale info, 
then every user must know the locale of the names in order to match 
correctly. This is an impossible burden for us to put on Internet 
users of any nationality. It is also a gigantic security hole because 
end users will have no idea where they will go if they enter names 
with the wrong locale. The statement that "this is an issue for the 
client, not for this WG" is a cop-out. The whole reason we are doing 
the IDN is for end users around the world.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium