FW: [gnso-idn-wg] Regarding WHOIS and language/scripts

["Olof Nordling" <olof.nordling@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,
As promised during today's call, regarding the topic of Whois aspects, I
forward the exchange below between Bruce and Charles (from the mailing list
a month ago), FYI.
Best regards
Olof

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gnso-idn-wg@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-gnso-idn-wg@xxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bruce Tonkin
Sent: Friday, December 29, 2006 3:58 AM
To: Charles Shaban; Olof Nordling
Cc: gnso-idn-wg@xxxxxxxxx; Donna Austin; Liz Williams; Tina Dam; Denise
Michel
Subject: [gnso-idn-wg] Regarding WHOIS and language/scripts

Hello Charles,

> 
> Very helpful thank you, especially for the people who were 
> not in Sao Paulo like me.
> I like to add one issue please at this stage which might be 
> related to issue number 10:
> 
> -What is the language to appear on the Whois database? Should 
> it be dual language (the language of the ccTLD and English)?

Do you mean language or script here?

With respect to language that would I assume only apply to the names of
the fields in WHOIS.

E.g "Technical Contact" in another language.

With respect to the contents of the Fields - e.g "Bruce Tonkin" being
the name of the Technical contact - I guess some names might be able to
be represented in multiple scripts and some not.

>From a Melbourne IT perspective we will output WHOIS in UTF-8 format by
default.   We may support other encodings - possibly using different
WHOIS servers.

Even with current non-IDN second level domains in .com, we are finding
that people located in countries that are non-English speaking prefer to
be able to supply their name in their preferred script.

With respect to IDN based domains - the question then becomes do we
simply output the name of the domain name in "xn--" format - which may
not be rendered properly by WHOIS display software, or do we send the
name out in a UTF-8 format which is probably likely to be handled by at
least web based WHOIS display software (but perhaps not text-based
port-43 WHOIS services).

I don't see the issue of multiple scripts in WHOIS as being constrained
to either IDN at the top level or the second level, but it is part of
the wider evolution of using a wider range of scripts over the Internet.
Some standardisation of approaches for WHOIS would be useful.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin