Re: Urdu IDNs: Characters in domain names

I disagree; that strikes me as impractical.

Fundamentally organizations are going to want TLDs based on their view of
the utility of those TLDs to the majority of users. I can well imagine that
a TLD for Iran might use a character that is not in Arabic; by analogy a TLD
for Austria might reasonably use RÖ (Republik Österreich).

What would work is if the TLDs are always treated as equivalents (aliases)
in DNS lookup; that way Joe Smith looking at a tourist site could always
type "abc.au" and get the same results as if he had typed "abc.rö".

Mark

On 8/23/07, Debbie Garside <md@ictenterprise.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> Richard wrote:
>
> I think that, if we are to use non-latin
> > characters for script-based TLDs, they must only be
> > characters that are readily accessible from keyboards of
> > people writing any language that uses that script.
>
> I agree - insofar as is possible.
>
> Best regards
>
> Debbie Garside
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: www-international-request@w3.org
> > [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Richard Ishida
> > Sent: 23 August 2007 19:19
> > To: 'Martin Duerst'; 'Sarmad Hussain'
> > Cc: 'Jonathan Rosenne'; www-international@w3.org;
> > public-iri@w3.org; psayo@idrc.org.in; 'Maria Ng Lee Hoon';
> > 'nayyara.karamat -'; cc@panl10n.net
> > Subject: RE: Urdu IDNs: Characters in domain names
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp]
> > > Sent: 20 August 2007 07:37
> >
> > > As an example, consider the TLD for Switzerland, "ch".
> > > Switzerland is a multilingual country with four official languages
> > > (see top left of http://www.admin.ch/).
> > > It would only be confusing both inside Switzerland as well
> > as outside
> > > if different languages used differnt TLDs for Switzerland. For many
> > > people, the "ch" is just conventional, best known because
> > it appears
> > > on the back of many cars.
> > > The "ch" is actually taken from the Latin (language, not
> > > script) name of the country, "Confoederatio Helvetica", but many
> > > people don't realize that, and for TLDs, it doesn't really matter.
> > > What matters is that people who want to know the TLD of Switzerland
> > > can look it up, can remember it, can type it, and so on. It's a
> > > benefit if a TLD is easily derivable from the country name
> > (e.g. "fr"
> > > for France), but it's not always so, because otherwise,
> > there would be
> > > clashes. It would be very confusing if a TLD changed depending on
> > > language (e.g. "ge" for Germany in English rather than the current
> > > "de" (Deutschland, Germany in German), or "al" for
> > Allemagne (Germany
> > > in French), or the many other names that Germany has in various
> > > languages. It might help some people a tiny bit, but it
> > would make it
> > > impossible to send URIs using these TLDs across language
> > boundaries,
> > > and would lead to conflicts because there are only so many
> > two-letter
> > > combinations.
> >
> > I think it's important to note that this only works well
> > because people writing any of the Swiss languages or English
> > can easily type the letters 'ch' from their keyboard.  If the
> > TLD had been ch I think there would have been a lot of
> > problems.  I think that, if we are to use non-latin
> > characters for script-based TLDs, they must only be
> > characters that are readily accessible from keyboards of
> > people writing any language that uses that script.
> >
> >
> > RI
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Mark