The lookalike problem(s)

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Sun Nov 26 23:18:54 CET 2006



--On Sunday, 26 November, 2006 13:00 -0800 Paul Hoffman
<phoffman at imc.org> wrote:

> At 2:45 PM -0500 11/26/06, John C Klensin wrote:
>> (1) I don't see any way to put a "one label, one script" rule
>> into the protocol in a way that would do us any good.
> 
> That's good to hear; we are in agreement then.
> 
>> But, Michael, this is, I believe, why you and Paul have been
>> confusing each other.  I think that he assumed, when we have
>> said "one label, one script", that the  test would be made on
>> "Greek script" only. The fact that the European digits aren't
>> "Latin script" is irrelevant -- from the standpoint of that
>> test as he (reasonably) interpreted it, it is important only
>> that they aren't Greek.
> 
> Right, sorry. The example would be the same for
> "<name-of-Greek-company>-USA.gr". We are not going to include
> all of "Common" either, of course.

Right.  And, as below, it would be up to the registry for .GR as
to whether to permit that.  After all, it is possible to spell
some reasonable abbreviation for "USA" in Greek too.  And, of
course, it would be possible to have
usa.<name-of-Greek-company>.gr as well.  Both matters of taste
and local preferences.

IMO, unless we find a mechanism that no one has been able to
think of yet, the only "script mixing" rule that belongs in the
protocol itself is one involving mixed LtoR and RtoL substrings.
Personally, I wish we could get rid of that one too, just to be
completely consistent about what belongs in the lookup protocol
and what is properly a restriction at registration time, but I
don't see any way to do that without introducing far more
confusion about ordering and rendering than the principle could
possibly be worth.

>> (3) While I am getting skeptical about the feasibility of
>> applying a label-homogeneity rules to the basic protocol,
>> these sorts of things makes perfectly good sense as a registry
>> restriction.
> 
> They can make good sense, but also can be unnecessarily
> onerous. I believe we should not be encouraging such rules,
> simply saying that they are reasonable in some cases, From the
> past few years of experience, I would say ccTLDs are better
> off picking-and-choosing which characters outside their
> natural script they would allow in their SLD names.

I think we are saying this differently, but are in agreement.

best,
    john




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