Mappings - some examples
Alexander Mayrhofer
alexander.mayrhofer at nic.at
Mon Nov 30 15:13:03 CET 2009
> Can you give evidence for this space being "heavily
> contaminated" by for example sending links to images on the
> web where the ß is in use in domain names?
You know very well that we don't know the level of contamination, because it's all hidden by the client right now. I agree, it's probably not as bad as swapping the well known port assignments of http and smtp ;), but the scary thing about this change to deployed namespace is that we simply don't know.
The only numbers i could gather was Erik van Poel's statistics from Google's inventory of crawled host names - he came up with 0.00001% of the domain names containing an "ß" (compared to 0.00122% for "ü").
That could mean two things:
- Either there's really not just that much "web-contamination" (but how much is there elsewhere?)
- Or nobody is interested in using it anyway (because even though it works right now, nobody is doing it...)
> My experience from Sweden is that uptake for use of for
> example 'ä' in domain names has just started although it has
> been possible to use for many years now (in the .SE TLD) and
> because of that my extrapolation of the situation is that it
> is not at all "heavily" contaminated. And that the change,
> although of course problematic, is very very similar to a
> normal sunrise for a registry, and a normal marketing
> campaign to the domain name holders.
>
> So if 'ä' would have been mapped in IDNA2003, and I now would
> have been asked if I thought 'ä' should be introduced, I
> would say "go for it, but speed up!!!".
Again, I think it's a *very* significant difference whether you open up a new part of a namespace, or you re-define the properties of existing namespace - re-definition is risky. Particularly if such a re-definition is combined with the effects of potentially incompatible mappings...
Alex
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