Re: [alac] IDN document, draft 4

[Wendy Seltzer <wendy@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:56 AM 12/16/2004 +0100, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> Wendy:
>
>   Some languages may give different, equally
> >valid, meanings to two variants that look alike to untrained eyes; avoiding
> >confusion in one script may deprive another of useful domain names.   For
> >that reason, your point 3 seems impossible to define uniformly, and thus
> >the paragraphs that follow from it utopian.
>
> Shouldn't someone should first look into it before making conclusions?

Absolutely.  I would recommend that someone survey a sample of languages to 
see where visually similar scripts have different meanings ("false 
positives") and where confusion is likely among variants that don't have 
semantic meaning.


> >I'm not sure why it's critical that all gTLDs be translated.  Ten years
> >down the road, I don't think it would be unrealistic to see (finally) a
> >profusion of TLDs, in which choice could be enriched by their offering
> >different options.  It's entirely possible -- and not necessarily a bad
> >thing -- that some wouldn't use ASCII script and would therefore be
> >difficult to type on a U.S. keyboard.  To me, the strongest support for
> >translatability would be a policy that all domains should be able to
> >interconnect easily with all others.  Have we ever articulated such a 
> policy?
>
> What do you mean by "interconnect"?

Must a user in one domain always be able to enter URIs in all other 
domains?  By typing them easily on the keyboard or entry device he or she 
uses?  Or are we willing to accept .[glyph], where [glyph] is non-ASCII and 
doesn't have any more mapping to ASCII than most of the ASCII domains have 
had to non-ASCII scripts?

I think universal interconnectability would be a worthwhile goal, in 
keeping with ICANN's technical stability mission.  There is a benefit to 
having a common script able to describe all domains.  But if that's one of 
our concerns in the IDN realm, we should articulate it better.

--Wendy

--
Wendy Seltzer -- wendy@xxxxxxxxxxx
Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html
Chilling Effects: http://www.chillingeffects.org/