Mapping?

Lisa Dusseault lisa.dusseault at gmail.com
Tue Dec 1 21:33:53 CET 2009


On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com> wrote:
> All I'm saying is that when someone uses a domain name it MUST go the same place as when anyone else does it.
>
> I'm not saying they have to sort in the same order or assign any other fixed linguistic behavior, but we MUST have consistency in the mappings.  Otherwise a Turkish user can't get to MICROSOFT.COM to troubleshoot why their caps-lock key is stuck.
>

One example I discussed with Patrik yesterday, was whether locale
might affect mapping. I'd like to get better insight into the general
understanding of that.

1. Could locale determine whether a PVALID character should be mapped
into another PVALID character prior to following the rules to turn
into an ALABEL?  I believe the consensus answer is probably SHOULD NOT
or MUST NOT because that would make domains with that valid character
unreachable by software using those locale rules.

2. Could locale determine whether, or how, a DISALLOWED character is
mapped into a PVALID character prior to getting an ALABEL?  For
example:
 - in locale Laputa, disallowed character Ȱ (x230) is not used in the
local language, so it's not mapped, an error occurs so a user seeing
that in a Web page can't reach any actual domain
 - in locale Balnibarbi, Ȱ (x230) is considered to be the same as O,
so it's mapped to 'o', and a Balnibarbi user reaches domains
containing o's
 - in locale Glubbdubdrig, Ȱ (x230) is considered to be the
capitalized version of ȱ (x231) and a Glubbdubdrig user reaches a
different set of domains containing ȱ's

Note that none of these locale rules would necessarily make domains
containing ȱ completely unreachable to their users -- a Web page
containing a link with ȱ would be looked up without mapping that
character to another (assuming the conclusion of point 1 above).

If I'm reading between the lines correctly, communication is hampered
between people who are writing under the assumption that this kind of
locale-dependent scenario is going to happen, and people who are
writing under the assumption that this kind of locale-dependent
scenario ought to be forbidden and nobody would try such a crazy
thing.

Lisa


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