Regarding ICANN's IDN tests... I am not an expert on IDN, so I am forced to rely on expert commentary. The following two comments appeared on the CPSR Governance list. I would appreciate it if any other IDN specialists could weigh in on the topic. Stephane Bortzmeyer: Since a Punycode name is a regular domain name, there was nothing to test and the authors of the different documents have some merit to be able to produce even these few pages. A lot of ICANN's money spent on that. Autonomica can thank them. (Of course, ICANN's primary motive was probably more to procrastinate about IDN.) Subbiah: I can't believe I am actually agreeing with Stephane on this one, (1) IDN as used today, was originally conceived by the Singapore team back in 1997/8 precisely so that the labels on the wire will all be effectively in ascii. Therefore by design they were not expected to cause any problems inherent in the non-English script themselves. That was the whole point. So its no surprise it works. While not in my mind totally useless as Stephane states, the current tests would never (:-)) have failed. (2) The ICANN test just announced was not in the full root but rather a lab-like, more limited environment. Similar tests were successfully conducted back in the year-long Asian testbed in 1998/9 by APNG. (3) As for a real-life test in large numbers on a large fraction of net users, while ICANN prepares to do one, a very close cousin has been ongoing in real commercial-life for 3 or more years in China involving over a 100M end-users and many tens of thousands of issued names, in the case of the Chinese script (which is about different as a script as you can imagine from ASCII, not that it matters from a puny code point of view). Similar efforts in other scripts but in smaller size are also ongoing for a number of years in a number of other countries/scripts, for example the Arab League sponsored (22 Arabic country Arabic script effort) with the participation of the monopoly national ISPs of several Arabic countries. ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/