Re: [idn] UTC feedback

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

> >> That aside, the proposed workaround is unreasonable in languages where
> >> a character without its accent is really different from a character
> >> with its accent.
> >
> >presumably, in those languages, you would not register the different
> >spellings of a label (with and without accents) - you would only
> >register the correct spelling.
> 
> Again, DNS is global, not local. IDNs are not defined such that
> anyone **knows** a priori which language a given IDN is using.

so if DNS is global, and the same differences in spelling are allowed
for allow labels (regardless of whether those accents are considered
significant or not in the language in which the label is written)
which local language's spelling conventions should govern the global
rules for registration of labels?  should it be one in which accents
are significant or one in which the accents are optional?

I don't see any way to make the registration rules "global" without 
imposing some language's assumptions on users of other languages 
which do not share those assumptions.  and that IMHO is not acceptable.

> >a registry has an intersting policy question if it is faced with
> >requests to register two labels in the same zone, which are in
> >different languages, when there's a conflict according to the rules
> >of one language but not the other.
> 
> We need to avoid registry's having to know what language an IDN
> is using, avoid the need for such policy decisions, and devise
> a global IDN system -- not a localised IDN system.  

if you figure out a way to do it, please let us all know.

some things need to be global and universal - request and response
formats, normalization, canonicalization, and the name tree itself.
but some decisions - like who gets to register which names within
a zone and which names are in conflict with others - are inherently 
part of the policy of the registry for that zone.  as long as
the on-the-wire interface is the same for each zone, why does it
matter if one zone registers multiple spellings of a  name and
another zone does not?

the IDN WG cannot dictate registration policy for all zones anyway.

> This is needed, at minimum, for gTLDs, but in practice needed even 
> for ccTLDs because of the requirement for global interoperability.

the root is just another registry and can have its own policy.  
even if there are gTLDs in different scripts, they can be carefully
chosen so as not to conflict with one another.  if they define so
many gTLDs that this isn't feasable, this will wreck the dns anyway,
and the fact that there are some conflicts with gTLD spellings
won't be the worst of our problems.

Keith