Friends and Colleagues,
Those who are interested in IDN work or know someone or some institute who
could contribute to the advancing of the usage of scripts and languages on
the Internet and in domain names, please read on. Please feel free to
circulate the message around.
Thank you,
Fahd Batayneh
ICANN
Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2014 12:25 AM
Subject: [vip] Speak up for your Language! Join a Panel Today
Dear Community Member,
In the past, labels in the Internet's Root Zone could only contain ASCII
characters. The rules for creating new top-level domain labels were simple:
labels must (i) only be composed of letters (a-z) in the English alphabet,
and (ii) consist of two to 63 characters. All of that is changing now. The
future holds a multilingual Internet, where a user from anywhere across the
world can navigate entirely in his or her native language.
Be a part of this historic change! ICANN is calling for volunteers to serve
on one of several panels that will define the rules for generating new
top-level domain labels for the script or writing systems for their
community.
Join a Generation Panel today by emailing <mailto:idntlds@icann.org>
idntlds(a)icann.org. Make sure to tell us the language you speak and the
script or writing system you want to get involved with. Please help inform
and motivate others to join as well.
The goal of these panels is to support the use of Internationalized Domain
Names (IDNs) by determining what is a valid top-level domain label in each
script or writing system. This involves answering three questions: (i) which
subset of characters from the various scripts can be used to form a
label[1], (ii) which of these characters (if any) may be considered
confusable or variants by end users, and (iii) what are additional
constraints[2] on these labels?
As there is a single Root Zone, all such label generation rules for all the
scripts must be merged into a single reference, which is called the Label
Generation Rule-set (LGR). The ICANN community has established a
<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/lgr-procedure-20mar13-en.pdf>
procedure to develop the LGR for the Root Zone. This procedure is divided
into three steps:
1. The basis is a subset of Unicode code points which may be
appropriate for the Root Zone and called the Maximal Starting Repertoire
(MSR).
2. Communities representing various scripts (e.g., Arabic, Cyrillic,
Devanagari, Greek, Chinese, Latin, Thai, etc.) are invited to organize into
Generation Panels to start from the MSR and propose the label generation
rules (which contains the three types of rules defined above) for their
respective scripts.
3. The script-based proposals developed by the communities are
reviewed by a panel of experts called the Integration Panel. Proposals that
meet the criteria in the
<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/lgr-procedure-20mar13-en.pdf>
procedure are integrated into the LGR by the Integration Panel. The LGR is
incrementally built upon until it contains all the necessary scripts.
For Step 1, ICANN recently released the
<https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2014-06-20-en> Maximal Starting
Repertoire (MSR-1), covering 22 scripts (Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic,
Devanagari, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Han, Hangul, Hebrew,
Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil,
Telugu and Thai) and containing 32,790 code points short-listed from 97,973
allowable code points from Unicode version 6.3. Work on additional scripts
will be completed soon.
Step 2 is now underway; ICANN needs your help in developing proposals to
extend the Root Zone LGR to cover each of these scripts. There is a role for
everyone: general script community representation as well as volunteers with
knowledge of scripts, linguistics, Unicode, IDNA/DNS or policy.
Volunteering is easy; just send an email to <mailto:idntlds@icann.org>
idntlds(a)icann.org. Join a Generation Panel today. Help ICANN support
top-level domain names in your language!
With kind regards,
IDN Program Team
ICANN
[1] Code points appropriate for labels must be letters and should be in
widespread modern use.
[1] For example, a label cannot be formed entirely by combining marks and
must contain at least two letters
_____
_____
[1] Code points appropriate for labels must be letters and should be in
widespread modern use.
[2] For example, a label cannot be formed entirely by combining marks and
must contain at least two letters
