Urdu IDNs: TLDs

This is a request for feedback from Sarmad Hussain, at Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing FAST National University.  He is looking at enabling Urdu IDNs based on ICANN recommendations, but this may lead to similar approaches in a number of other countries.

Sarmad writes: "We are trying to make the URL enabled in Urdu for people who are not literate in any other language (a large majority of literate population in Pakistan).  ICANN has only given specs for the Domain Name in other languages (through its RFCs).  Until they allow the TLDs in Urdu, we are considering an application end solution: have a plug in for a browser for people who want to use it, which URL in Urdu, strips and maps all the TLD information to .com, .pk, etc. and converts the domain name to punycode Thus, people can type URLs in pure Urdu which are converted to the mixed English-Urdu URLs by the application layer which ICANN currently allows."

"We are currently trying to figure out what would be the “academic” requirements/solutions for a language.  To practically solve the problem, organizations like ICANN would need to come up with the solutions."

I suggest that this thread be used for any comments on policy for top level domains proposed in the attached Excel file. (If anyone is unable to read the file, I will ask Sarmad to provide an HTML version.)

I'll start another thread for any comments on the list of characters to be allowed or not in domain names, since I think there are some significant talking points there.

RI

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Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
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