Re: [idn] Re: back to the future

[Mark Davis <markdavis@ispchannel.com>]

Let's be a bit careful about the use of the term "character". In the context of
character encoding, "!@#$%^&*,./?;:()'... <space> etc. are all characters. Perhaps
what is meant is "letter", or "character that can be part of a word". For example,
a hyphen is not a letter, but it can certainly form part of a word in English, as
in "re-educate" or "co-author".

As far as a "letter" that looks like the colon, there is the U+02D0 MODIFIER
LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON used to mark length in IPA.
(http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr24/charts/ScriptChart0.html, if you have
a Unicode font) Patrick can confirm, but I suspect in Swedish it is a regular old
colon.

Mark

"J. William Semich" wrote:

> AFAIK, there is no "character" with the glyph : in the Latin character set.
> Patrik, can you point to where we can find such a character or diacritic or
> character part (whatever) in a UNICODE page or if not, is it defined
> anywhere else as a glyph or diacritic?
>
> Or is it used in Swedish more like the ASCII apostrophe in, say, the Irish
> name  "O'Neil"? Meaning it is, in fact, ASCII?
>
> TIA,
>
> Bill
>
>  At 02:11 AM 9/18/00 +0800, James Seng wrote:
> >As I understand from Patrik's example of his middle name, ":" in Swedish is a
> >character, not a punctation.
> >
> >For example, we could say we allow ":" only if the rest of the string is
> not a
> >number. This is what I mean by having some "consideration" in nameprep.
> >However, we may be opening a rathole here once we go started on this path.
> (@,
> >', & is going to be more tricky...) Aside, if we allow H:son, then there
> is no
> >reason to forbid O'Brien.
> >
> >Of course, this means the application must be able to handle new form of
> >parsing, understanding I18N domain names. I guess that is what IDNA is for.
> >
> >-James Seng
> >
> >
> >Bill Manning wrote:
> >>
> >>         or just what IS that thing anyway?
> >>
> >>         the ":"  in what encoding method?
> >>
> >>         We've had this discussion a couple of times
> >>         before and -always- end up in semantic ratholes.
> >>
> >>         Patricks ":" is conceptually different than the http ":".
> >>         To paraphrase from the good Doctor, speaking as
> >>         HumptyDumpty; "Glyphs mean want I want them to mean. The
> >>         question is who is to be master?"
> >>
> >>         Pick an encoding.
> >>
> >>
> >> % James Seng <James@Seng.cc> wrote:
> >> % > If RACE or some encoding which does not 7bit ASCII as-is is been
> >> % > choosen (in otherwords, UTF-8 is out), then it _may_ be possible for
> >> % > domain names to have ":" or punctations with some consideration put in
> >> % > place without causing too much havoc.
> >> %
> >> % When I type http://foo:80/ into my browser, should it interpret that
> >> % as host foo port 80, or as an internationalized host name containing a
> >> % colon?  How would I specify the other?
> >> %
> >> % AMC
> >>
> >> --bill
> >
> >
> Bill Semich
> President and Founder
> .NU Domain Ltd
> http://whats.nu
> bill@mail.nic.nu