[ssac-gnso-irdwg] Draft: Questions for ICANN IDN staff - Tina Dam - from the WhoIs IRD WG

["Robert C. Hutchinson" <rchutch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello WhoIs IRD WG,

Here is my suggested questions for discussion between the Whois IRD WG and
ICANN IDN Staff / Tina Dam.

Reply with your clarifications and suggestions.

Thanks,

Bob Hutchinson



The WhoIs IRD WG is requesting expertise/assistance from the IDN team.

The WhoIs IRD WG is considering recommending that WhoIs Internationalized
Domain name registrant data [name and address] for owner and contact be
tagged with language.   Furthermore, it would be advantageous to constrain
the content of language tagged fields to only the legitimate characters of
the tagged language.   Ideally we would like to locate existing UTF-8
language tables and reference them, rather than creating "ICANN WHOIS
language tables".


Based on reviewing the  IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Workshop slides,
http://sel.icann.org/node/6740/,  the IDN team addressed similar issues
surrounding the use of scripts, languages and character sets.

Apparently the IDN team decided that each TLD/registry would define the
language character sets acceptable for 2nd-level domain names.  Those files
are stored at IANA:  http://www.iana.org/domains/idn-tables/  and reference
linked character code pages.  This system provides the flexibility for each
TLD to define each language, but has the disadvantage [for example] of
defining the Swedish character set three different ways.


We would like to invite members of the IDN team to discuss the following
questions with the Whois IRD WG:

1) Given the current state of IDN language definitions – are there
ways/suggestions that the existing IANA-IDN language definitions could be
leveraged to help with WhoIs  IRD?

2) Did the IDN team explore or select a suitable established “standard”
language tags/code? Like ISO 639-3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes  for  designating which
language a domain name [TLD or second-level] is encoded in?

3)  Are there other [ISO{8859/2022}/HTML?] language code page standards
which are UTF-8 based, which could be used/leveraged to easily define WhoIs
IRD language character sets?

4) Help?  Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.