RE: [idn] VIDN

["Richard Barr Hibbs" <rbhibbs@ultraDNS.com>]

> >a) VIDN assumed that all non-English domain names are transliterated into
> >    English for current domain names which is seriously
> questionable. Sure,
> >    it works for Korean, but what about other languages?
>
> It doesn't work for Swedish.
>
> Example, å _and_ ä are normally translitterated into 'a', and there
> are two cities in Sweden named "Habo" and "Håbo" which both are
> translitterated into "Habo".
>

...yes, this is a definite problem, but it is much worse than that:

--the VIDN proposal centered on phonetic transformation into a form that
could be represented by the 26 characters of the roman alphabet.  Homonyms
break this scheme almost immediately.  For example, the english word
"flower" is "hana" in Japanese, using the common Hepburn transliteration,
but the english word "nose" is also "hana" within the limits of the
transliteration scheme.

--transliteration schemes never quite seem to be fixed for all time.  Recall
that the official transliteration of Chinese (Mandarin, I think) underwent a
radical change not so many years ago:  Peking became Beijing, for example.

--we must not be so arrogant as to assume that the preferred transliteration
is to mono-case ASCII.  It would seem that if we are trying to represent
sounds, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) would be a better choice
(ignoring the lack of IPA support in DNS and most computer systems.)


Barr