draft-liman-tld-names-00.txt and bidi

Ram Mohan rmohan at afilias.info
Tue Mar 10 01:08:55 CET 2009


Tina Dam wrote:
> There are people that would like digits intermixed with ASCII characters 
> in a TLD. Right now they cannot have that because we don't allow is across 
> scripts, regardless of them being considered IDNs or not. Another reason 
> is that some of these interested parties are looking at labels with 2 
> characters, one being a digit, which also currently is not allowed, due to 
> confusability against the ISO-list and existing and future ccTLDs. If 
> there are other more technical/DNS specific reasons for making that ban 
> stay as it is I would very much like to hear it.

Somewhat orthogonal topic:
+ There has been considerable discussion in the Arabic Script IDN Working 
Group (ASIWG) regarding banning the mixing of the Eastern Arabic-Indic 
digits(U+06F0-06F9)  with the Arabic-Indic digits(U+0660-0669), at the 
protocol level.  The primary reason for this is becuase many of the 
characters between those two sets look identical.  Of course, as in many 
other IDN labels, mixing with ASCII would be allowed.

+ In this case, the mixing ban being discussed is within a script 
(orthogonal to the cross-script case listed above), but the problem remains 
real enough to spark discussion that digit-family homogenity be enforced at 
the protocol level.

+ A more detailed technical paper is currently in discussion in the ASIWG 
list, with public archives at 
http://lists.irnic.ir/pipermail/idna-arabicscript/.

-ram 



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