Re: [alac] FW: Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
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. We have e-mail in all sorts of non-latin scripts. We have web pages and search engines and IM and dozens of other applications as well. It seems to me that we have all sorts of localized solutions to finding resources. It would be entirely reasonable to declare that the DNS and Unicode simply don't fit together, so we're not going to try, and DNS names are just strings that aren't supposed to mean anything in any language (a viewpoint already endorsed by the owners of domains like 7m2s.biz.) Unfortunately, the IDN monster has escaped far enough that I doubt we can kill it now. The technical IDN community believes that it is a technical requirement to represent all languages equally well with IDNs. They made a big mistake once to invent a DNS that handles English* but no other languages, and they're not willing to make that mistake again. Compounding the problem, IDNs for some languages work just fine. For languages like French or German that have character sets only slightly larger than English, or (as I understand it) for Chinese and Japanese that have large character sets but straightforward typography, the current punycode system works. The languages that are left out are the ones from the parts of the world that are already on the wrong side of the digital divide with poor access and high prices. Do we really want to say, too bad, we're using a half-way IDN technology and they lose again? R's, John * - and, I suppose, Hawaiian and a few other minor languages that use only ASCII characters
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