Proposed Charter for the IDNAbis Working Group

[Martin Duerst]

At 20:49 08/03/26, Gervase Markham wrote:

>However, I don't want to have to have the "why are you allowing line-drawing and other non-letters in your IDNs?" - "Er, it's a business differentiator" conversation with 50 different registries.

I frankly don't understand why some people are affraid of line-drawing
or smiley or similar characters. Whether they are included or excluded
doesn't really make any difference. If a registry thinks they are a
differentiator, they may be, but only in the sense that the registry
will be able to cheat some users into buying domain names with these
characters in them.

Let's face it: These characters, for the most part, are very difficult
to type (or otherwise input) in most contexts. Characters that are difficult
to input are almost useless in domain names. Domain names containing
these characters are very much useless, too. As a bottom line, natural
selection will make sure we won't get too many of these.

This is different from some very specific, small subset of symbols
that may be highly similar to e.g. dot or hyphen or so, which indeed
can create problems.

Regards,    Martin.s


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp