Moving Right Along on the Inclusions Table...

Kenneth Whistler kenw at sybase.com
Thu Jan 4 00:30:30 CET 2007


Martin asked:

> At 04:27 06/12/22, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> 
> >Internet identifiers don't *require* word separators, and
> >if anything the predominant use of the existing "-" has
> >been to cause trouble and spoofing, rather than to
> >"do the job".
> 
> Can you explain? Do you mean e.g. spoofing www.microsoft.com
> with www.micro-soft.com? Or something else?

Yes, I meant stuff like that.

In other words, we can argue that hyphen is supposed to function
as a word separator, and expect people would use hyphens to
"improve readability" in domain names. I.e., for English at
least, people "should" register:

night-at-the-museum.com

But of course, they don't. They register:

nightatthemuseum.com

instead, not because it is easier to read, but because it is
shorter and *way* easier to type correctly. In fact, if you
actually type night-at-the-museum.com, you get redirected by
a cybersquatter to (today) an ad for laser hair removal.

The trend in real use, as I see it, is for people to *expect*
that they can type in multiple-word domain names they "hear"
as phrases, without hyphens (or spaces, of course) and get
to the right location. I suspect practice in domain name registry
is tending to follow that expectation, and in such a context,
use of hyphens is more likely to come from a spoofer than
from the intended registrant.

I just don't see any *requirement* here to start down the
road of looking for word separators on a script-by-script
basis, for Ethiopic or anything else, for domain names.
This is a specialized string identifier usage that requires
some degree of attention to completeness of repertoire
on a per-script basis (i.e., not leaving out letters and combining
marks willy-nilly), but which does *not* need to obey the
same rules of punctuation for legibility (or word separation)
that normal text does.

--Ken



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