Re: [alac] FW: Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)

["Hong Xue" <hongxueipr@xxxxxxxxx>]

Confucius said: 'Is it not gentlemanly not to take offense when others
fail to understand what you mean?'

The non-Latin script users are so gentlemanly that they would not even
take offense of the message, let along shooting the messengers.

The term "IDN" is actually a paradox.  Domain names in the American
Standard Code for Information Interchange is already
internationalized--they are being used prevalently around the world.
Enabling native non-Latin scripts used in the web/email addresses
should be going to another direction--localization to cater the local
language users' demand. Then, why do we have a term "internationalized
domain names"? Say, are domain names in Yiddish scripts so
internationalized as to be usable by Korean people? Yiddish is still
for some Jewish communities, and Korean is still for Korean.

All the difficulties are caused by forcing the localized solutions
into the internationalized context. If it had not been some corporate
giant(s) that zealously pursued commercial interests by starting
registration of domain names in non-Latin scripts and thus framed this
issue into the DNS, all kinds of localized solutions--probably at the
application level above the DNS--would have developing steadily and
healthly. Ordinary users won't mind whether there are IDN roots or
mapping or punycode. They simply want to use their scripts. We should
remember who had hijacked the development direction and threw out the
concept of IDNs that must be resolved in the DNS.

If after ages of profound research,  those highly respectable experts
conclude that there is no way to realize the IDNs, then at least users
may expect some localized though imperfect solution to address their
need. But on the contrary, the experts insist that IDNs can be done
and will be done in a way that is different from what the users
believe happens or should happen. Then, what is the meaning of the
IDNs if they are useless to the users?

Hong