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

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

Hi Dave et al,
Thanks for the excellent comments/observations from everyone.
A business friend of mine is the head of elections and Clerk Recorder [birth
certificates] for Santa Cruz County, so I called her to glean the wisdom of
how this is handled in US/California law.
According to her office manager, basically there are no formal rules!..
The systems at the DMV[used for motor voter registrations and voter
verification] allow only for A-Z in names and A-Z plus numbers and some
special characters for addresses.  This is entirely by convention.  The rule
is you can have anything the system will handle - and is on my keyboard -
but don't ask for anything extra.  Hey,it's the government... If you ask for
a Spanish surname [on a birth certificate] spelled with tilde over the N ,
you get an N.
Also- what goes in Santa Cruz County may not be true in Santa Clara County,
so it is entirely possible that other counties operate by different rules.

Nothing prevents us from adopting less restrictive character rules - but
because, I believe, early IBM punch-card systems only did uppercase letters
and numbers, this convention persists.
I tried calling the California Secretary of State, but the person I reached
was no help at all...


On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 4:20 AM, Dave Piscitello
<dave.piscitello@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Again, apologies for missing yesterday's call.
>
> I have a question related to this discussion. In composing language tables
> with "legitimate" characters for a language, I began to wonder whether
> there
> are real world constraints on mixed scripts in the composition of names.
>
> For example, can a US citizen have a birth certificate where the given or
> surname contains letters other than A-Z? I believe a US citizen can have a
> name containing characters from extended ASCII sets (umlauts, tildes, etc).
> People often name their children unconventionally: could someone compose a
> name for my child that contained both an umlaut and tilde?) and would this
> be accepted as a legal name in the US (or other country)? Would a "yes"
> answer to these questions influence this discussion?
>
> Can a Chinese citizen have a surname that is composed of characters from
> one
> accepted Chinese script and a given name composed using characters from a
> second?
>
> Apologies if this is off topic. Feel free to send me away for more coffee.
>
> On 1/25/11 4:12 AM, "Robert C. Hutchinson" <rchutch@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > 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 ³standard²
> > 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.
>
>