comments on draft-ietf-idnabis-bidi

[Alireza Saleh]

John C Klensin wrote:
> --On Friday, February 13, 2009 00:23 +0330 Alireza Saleh
> <saleh at nic.ir> wrote:
>
>   
>> I didn't mean to say that your rules are not suffiecient, what
>> I'm  trying to say is that both your suggested restrictions
>> and the current  bidi restrictions are much more that required
>> fo limited number of  scripts which going to be supported by a
>> single TLD, however by having  very restrictive rules the
>> possibility of happening the visual confusion  exists. I'm
>> trying to say that the rules for preventing visual  confusions
>> can be defined by TLD such as other policies because any 
>> introduced  IDN TLD is going to support limited number of
>> scripts and  languages. For example if you see
>> الف۱۲۳.ایران and الف١٢٣.ایران you 
>> cannot tell which Arabic number set has been used according to
>> the  protocol but the TLD should clarify it.
>> So now that this clarifications are required by TLD, why we
>> cannot trust  the registry to define all clarifications for
>> supporting scripts and  languages.
>>     
>
> Alireza,
>
> As you work through these cases, please do remember that we
> assume that all domains that are truly "generic" and/or "global"
> with regard to registrations are likely to end up needing to
> support _all_ scripts and mnemonics derived from all languages.
> Certainly most of the existing gTLDs fall into that category as
> do those ccTLDs that have concluded that it is in their interest
> to encourage registrations from anyone with money.
>
> At least for those domains, basing rules on the assumption that
> a given TLD and its subdomains will be supporting only a very
> limited number of scripts (or a very narrow range of characters)
> is probably unreasonable.
>
>      john
>
>
>
>
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>   
Dear John,


I agree that TLDs are global, but please do remember that IDNA only
talks about labels instead of full URL so having very restrictive rules
may restrict users from registering their desired domains while known
visual confusions are still possible. With this scenario not only does the
gTLD operator lose registrations due to not supporting some part of
the language yet also cannot guarantee a confusion-free URL. In
addition, I think that  IDN has been introduced to encourage communities
to have their own scripts and to enable them to have their email
addresses and URLs in their script without the need to know other
scripts or even know about keyboad switching mechanism. Therefore,  I
think IDN TLDs are not _generic_ and _global_ in the sense of current
ASCII TLDs.
For instance, I think supporting Chinese label under an Arabic-script
TLD is not in the TLD's interest and if they want to support such names 
then the
TLD operator will put herself into a bigger problem which would be
script mixing(and as you know, label mixing is beyond the scope of IDNA).


Alireza