Re: [idn] UTC feedback

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

> I guess I see this as an international registry on a first-come, first-served
> basis, with the addition of restrictions pertaining to squatters.  Obviously
> there will be regional name authorities for the .fr, .de, .bc.ca, etc. country
> extensions, province extensions, and whatever other extensions are set up.  So
> if the Thé Café wants to register "thécafé.fr" and "thecafe.fr" 
> and "thécafe.fr" and "thecafé.fr", then of course it is up to the 
> .fr registration authority.

something tells me that different registration authorities will want to
set up different rules for this, based on the conventions of the language
they use most often, and that many of the registration authorities will 
want some automatic tools dealing with alternate spellings and/or
preventing name collisions.

> > can we satisfy ourselves that we need only deal with
> > 
> > a) the word spelled with all accents, and
> > b) the word spelled without any accents
> > 
> > for all languages, or do we also need to deal with every possible
> > combination of a letter being accented or not?
> 
> I'm afraid this isn't any more user friendly - in any case, it is impossible 
> to tell from seeing an "E" whether "e", "é", "è", or "ê" is intended 
> without knowledge of the word in context.  Even a dictionary lookup won't 
> work, because some words differ only by the accent (indeed the accent is 
> there to distinguish the 2 words).

I'm assuming that if one wants to register a domain name that can be
spelled with or without accents, in a language which allows spelling
of the name with or without accents, then the accented form is registered.
as a side effect of this the system somehow checks to make sure that
there are no collisions - neither the unaccented form of that word, 
nor any other word which has the same accented form, has been registered.

but unless we're going to build a user feedback loop into the system
(which obviously we'd rather not do) you can't have it both ways.
either the user is expected to type in the name with all accents,
or he's not expected to do so.  if the latter, then the zone 
(rather than the client) has to deal with registering multiiple
records, or searching for the right match - whichever is done.

> > all of the above presumes that we're using a modified version of DNS
> > rather than some new protocol.  if we do it with a new protocol then
> > we could investigate alternate approaches.
> 
> Such as?  You mean providing the user with all the possible choices, 
> based on a known language and dictionary lookup?

providing the user with the list of matching names from that zone.
(and you'd rather not have to do this for multiple zones)

Keith