Language requirements

Gervase Markham gerv at mozilla.org
Tue Dec 19 18:28:20 CET 2006


Paul Hoffman wrote:
> We cannot build this assumption into IDNAbis. "com" "net" "org" "biz" 
> "info" and so on have no such language requirements.

Oh, but they do. They have the requirements equal to the sum of the 
requirements of the language communities they choose to serve. There is 
nothing which says that the .biz registry has to support Icelandic if 
they decide not to.

If I were a gTLD registry, I would start by allowing IDNs in the scripts 
for which there was most demand, and expand my repertoire one script at 
a time, all the while putting in place policies to make sure that the 
introduction of each new set of characters did not cause problems for 
the users of existing sets.

So if I was allowing character X in a particular script Foo, and I 
wanted to start allowing script Bar which had character X' which is 
confusable with X, I would institute bundling or blocking to prevent 
problems.

Knowing what we know, I would hope no gTLD registry would be cavalier 
enough to say "OK, they've reduced the IDN set a bit. We allow 
registrations of domains containing any combination of the remaining 
characters, without restriction". (Such a policy certainly wouldn't get 
IDN turned on for them in Firefox, at any rate.)

Gerv


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