Re: [alac] FW: Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
Bret Fausett ha scritto: ICANN welcomes the recently announced Request for Comments (RFC4690) from the Internet Architecture Board (IAB). The document describes issues surrounding the continued development of IDNs. ICANN recommends all interested parties in the community to review the issues described and to participate in the development of solutions. I'm not sure what kind of comments we are expected to submit, if any, but there are pieces of this document which I found a bit ridiculous... Take for example this one (start of section 2): It is important to identify this entire range of problems because users, registrants, and policy makers often do not understand the protocol and other technical issues but only the difference between what they believe happens or should happen and what actually happens. First, the definition of "users, registrants, and policy makers" as people who "do not understand" is deeply telling of the attitude of the authors. Then, the difference between "what they believe happens" (you know, they don't understand) and "what actually happens", rather than indicating a problem in the usability of the entire thing and thus in the way engineers have been conceiving and implementing it, is taken as a "source of problems"! Such as, the system we engineered would be perfect, if it wasn't to be used by imperfect human beings... As for the substance, I have a suggestion for what regards 3.1: I understand that this might be a pain in the ass (but still possible at this stage), but why don't they expand punycode to represent also the version number of Unicode that was used in the conversion? Or do I get the issue wrong? In 5.1.2., the idea of banning the hyphen from non-ASCII strings doesn't make much sense. Why should I be able to get la-mia-casa.org but not il-mio-caffè.org? Either you get rid of the hyphen altogether (but that's impossible), or you allow it for everyone. In general, if you bear with the constant blaming of the Unicode Consortium, the document seems mostly good, but the more I read these unbelievably complex discussions, the more I think that we should just take a breath and jump into some (perhaps controlled) reality... and deal with problems after they actually materialize. My final note, however, is the horrible sense of "something is wrong" that you get by reading the acknowledgements (section 7). Apart from one Chinese name, and one woman, all the rest seems to be the product of a big bunch of male Western engineers. For something that's expected to understand and serve the long neglected needs of the growing population of Asian, East-European and African Internet users, that does raise my eyebrow. -- vb. [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<----- http://bertola.eu.org/ <- Prima o poi...
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