RE: Urdu IDNs: Characters in domain names

At 20:04 07/08/24, Richard Ishida wrote:
>> From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp] 

rom their keyboard.  If the TLD had been ch
>> 
>> I guess you wrote both 'c' and 'h' with some 'decorations', 
>> but these got lost somewhere.
>
>Yes, indeed. I wrote c-cedilla. So now I'm also worried about mail systems
>corrupting non-ASCII TLDs, and causing confusion at the receiver's end !

Well, lots of mail software is older than the Web, and hasn't
been upgraded at the same rate, because there were less new
'must-have' features and less security holes. Also, people
tend to stick to their mailers for longer because exporting
all you mail to another mailer is way more brittle than
exporting your bookmarks and stuff to another browser.

But in general, the rule would be that you send Arabic-script
domain names when you are using Arabic script anyway with
your counterpart, and so on for other scripts, and you won't
e.g. include a Mongolian-script domain name in a mail to
somebody you don't know whether s/he reads Mongolian.

This is an additional argument showing that using characters
outside the basic set of characters used in a script is a bad
idea. If you e.g. use the basic Arabic characters, they will
pass through any Arabic-script-enabled mailer, even if the
mailer isn't Arabic-language.

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp     

Received on Monday, 27 August 2007 01:56:42 UTC