Re: [alac] FW: Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)
Now, we have good reasons to suspect whether "what will actually happen" under the guidance of these *male Western engineers* are going to ignore the users' wishes expectations on the IDNs. I don't think anyone is ignoring users' wishes and expectations. The problem is that the DNS is a database, but people want it to be a search engine. Life would be a lot easier for IDN users if it were possible to look up names with approximate matching, or have multiple versions of a single name. But the DNS does what it does, it's implemented on probably a billion computers around the world, and we are stuck with it. The problem is to figure out the best IDN we can build on top of DNS, and that is the very hard problem. I believe a large part of the problem is that few people see the whole IDN problem at once. If you live in Europe, dealing with a roman and cyrillic characters and a modest set of accents and modifiers isn't very hard. If you live in China, dealing with all of the characters is harder, but still not that hard. But if you live in other parts of the world where there are multiple forms of characters and multiple modifiers, it gets harder, and when you have to invent an IDN system that can do everything at the same time, it's really, really hard. So while the male western engineers may not understand all of the cultural issues in every country, please do not assume that they aren't giving you want you want just because they don't think it's important. It's because nobody can figure out how to do it and make it work. Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
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