Re: [idn] Re: character tables

[Erik van der Poel <erik@vanderpoel.org>]

Cary Karp wrote:
> In addition to the range of operating conditions implied above, there 
> are differences in the way the registries have interpreted and 
> implemented ICANN's IDN Guidelines. That document states, "As the 
> deployment of IDNs proceeds, ICANN and the IDN registries will review 
> these Guidelines at regular intervals, and revise them as necessary 
> based on experience." We are now clearly at such a juncture, and the 
> revision process is already being initiated.

Hi Cary,

It is really nice to hear from you. I have an idea for the Guidelines. 
As Paul has indicated, the various communities around the world have 
different needs, and some have already started writing down the rules 
that they are following in their registries. The JET community comes to 
mind:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3743.txt

Other communities have other needs. I've been told that some communities 
use a set of letters that are currently encoded in two different ranges 
of the Unicode space (e.g. Latin and Cyrillic). Today, my idea is that 
these communities can "occupy" their "own" part of the DNS space, for 
example a .tld or a .2ld.tld. They can publish the rules that they 
enforce in their registries, and then the browsers can either allow any 
character sequence in those labels or check them to see if the rules 
were indeed followed.

Of course, it is much harder to come up with and enforce rules in a 
"global" TLD like .com. As a result, the browsers may simply blacklist 
.com in its entirety. Or maybe .com will eventually figure out some 
rules and actually enforce them in the 2LDs, so that the browsers don't 
have to check the 2LDs. Indeed, in a perfect world, .com would even 
enforce rules in 3LDs, 4LDs, etc, so that browsers would not have to 
check those either. We shall see what .com does.

But in the meantime, how about my idea for the Guidelines?

Erik