Changing the values of domain names and the need for mapping

[William Tan]

I agree with Paul on this specific issue.

The problem is with existing references _in Unicode_ (IRI or otherwise) that
may contain eszett. They work today, albeit as a side effect of IDNA2003.

What's problematic is embedded hyperlinks in web pages over which the domain
owner has no control. I'm talking about: <a
href="http://straße.ca<http://strasse.ca>
">straße.ca <http://strasse.ca></a>

One might argue that these references are not officially sanctioned, but the
fact remains that we will be breaking these references. That seems to fall
under "breaking dns stability".

I'm not sure if the registries who planned to deal with this really
understand the implications. It's like DNS suddenly became case sensitive,
but on a miniature (though perhaps negligible) scale.

Zone files are of no use here, because there is no way for a registry to
tell if the name with "ss" was really meant to be a mapped-out eszett. How
is the registry going to bundle? That seems like a major nightmare to me,
but I agree that that should be discussed elsewhere.

To determine the magnitude of problem this might cause, we probably need
search engine crawler data.

In order to keep the mapping out of the protocol, I can see this coming:
1. Software, even after upgrading to IDNA2008, will continue to map eszett
to "ss"
2. Registries will never allow registration of eszett, because it won't work
(see #1)

We wouldn't want a browser maintained "should_map_eszett_for_this_tld" list
either.

Is that any better than keeping it DISALLOWED?

=wil

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Cary Karp <ck at nic.museum> wrote:

> > My specific concern here is when it is forced on registries based on
> > bits-on-the-wire changes that we are proposing. Changing Those Two
> > Characters to be PVALID either forces a change in registry operations
> > and registrant operations, or it causes unpredictable and unexpected
> > results for users of IDNA2003.
>
> The Esszett currently maps out of the IDN space, entirely, and there
> are no domain names that include them. If the Esszett becomes
> available for inclusion in domain names, any registry that opts to
> support it will be in precisely the same situation as, for example,
> the .SE registry was when it added support for the Swedish å ä ö. It
> had previously required that these be remapped to undecorated
> characters prior to registration, and needed to decide how to deal
> with the holders of remapped names who would have preferred to
> register the localized forms if that had previously been permitted.
>
> /Cary
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