Eszett and IDNAv2 vs IDNA2008

Cary Karp ck at nic.museum
Sat Mar 14 12:11:22 CET 2009


Quotiing Shawn:

> I certainly agree that if my name were spelled "Weiß", then I'd be
> pretty picky about not using "Weiss".  However if it were my business
> name, I certainly would want both Weiss and Weiß to go to my web
> server.  Same way I'd want bücher.de and bucher.de to go to the same
> place. 

There is a clear difference in the orthographic latitude that people
(at least in my Scandinavian neck of the woods) tolerate in the
representation of common lexemes, as compared to the rigor applied to
proper names. Frau Mueller would likely be more than casually irritated
by a TLD registry that had automatically given her name to Frau Müller,
or otherwise prevented its autonomous registration, especially if this
was because of protocol constraints imposed by people who freely
confessed to little understanding of the German language, but were
apparently unwilling to credit the proximal registries with the ability
to sort out the quirks and consequences of what, despite the best of
efforts, will always require some degree of local interpretation.

Müller's and Mueller's Nordic namesakes, Möller, Møller, and Moeller,
appear long since to have convinced the cc registries that they would
be most likely to patronize, that the notions of bundling and
blocking cannot realistically be implemented in cases such as this
(without suggesting that any of the other obvious registries feel
or act otherwise).

> I am certainly not going to argue that words SHOULD be spelled with
> ss instead of ß.  Obviously that is wrong, or at least clutzy.

How does this even become an issue here?  Have we demonstrated that
the established orthographic authorities for the countries where the
differentiation between ss and ß, or teasing apart such things as ae ä
and æ, are issues, cannot be reflected in the namespace without risk to
the secure and stable operation of the DNS? Or are we simply
postulating that the respective TLD registries aren't going to be able
to address their specific local concerns without the same risk?

Before anybody points it out, I am fully aware that the inherent
problems apply to all zones on all levels. This does not imply,
however, that the administrators of lower-level zones are inherently
less able to accommodate local nuance than are the TLD managers.

> How come nobody has insisted that fussball.de and fußball.de should
> be discrete names?

See above.

/Cary


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