Eszett again (was Re: Parsing the issues and finding a middle ground -- another attempt)

[Marcos Sanz/Denic]

Wil,

> What would be the right way for a registry to bundle the existing names 
such that compatibility with IDN2003 can be maintained?

too gerenic a question to be answered concretely. Each ccTLD registry has 
just to serve best the necessities of its own community.

> I'm not sure if denic solicited the "original" domain name (before 
ToASCII) at the time of registration. For at least some 
> registries who implemented IDNs, only the punycode domain name is needed 
for registration (along with a language tag.) Therefore, 
> the original domain name, if it contained eszett, would not be known to 
the registry.

FWIW at registration time DENIC does solicit both the internationalized 
domain name and the ASCII compatible encoding, but the acceptable 
characters for the IDN are restricted to those that survive Nameprep(). 
Thus, we don't know either whether the registrant actually wanted an 
eszett or not, but I don't discard that some of our registrars might have 
that information at their disposal.

> Would these registries have to bundle all domains that contain sequences 
of "ss" by "mapping it back" to eszett? So, the 
> registrant for "grosses.tld" gets ""großes.tld". For longer sequences of 
repeated "s", there are also permutations of mapped and 
> unmapped eszetts so multiple variations will have to be generated and 
placed in a bundle. As a contrived example, "ssss" may get 
> "ßß", "ßss", "ssß", "sßs".

I am well aware of that. That is parallel to the Greek tonos problem.

Best regards,
Marcos