On Sat, Nov 01, 2014 at 10:32:12PM +0000, Fahd Batayneh wrote:
https://www.icann.org/news/blog/making-progress-on-internationalized-domain- names
That posting contains at least one pretty glaring error: "In 2010, hostnames used in the DNS were limited to a subset of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters used for alphabetic letters, digits, and the hyphen (known as "LDH")." RFC 3490, "Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)", was published in 2003 (which is why it's now informally called "IDNA2003"). There were doubtless some concerns with IDNA2003, but forcing everone to use LDH was not among its faults. There are other things about the posting that are pretty strange: First, I have no idea what Russ's OpenStand blog posting has to do with IDNA. Second, "While these numbers represent significant progress, there is still more work to be done to ensure people around the world can access the Internet in their local language." For most people, there is _no problem at all_ accessing the Internet in a local language. HTML and HTTP have included language and encoding negotiation effectively forever. Email bodies have been internationalizable since the publication of MIME, and even very old mail user agents have been able to cope with that -- I recall using pine on a conservatively-administered SunOS machine in the 1990s and being able to read internationalized mail bodies. The problem that IDNA solves is the internationalization of (mostly server) identifiers on the Internet. The problem that EAI (internationalized email) solves is internationalizing the local-part of the mail address (the ajs in ajs@anvilwalrusden.com), and nothing else. These are both important advances, but it hardly does anyone any service to overplay their importance in the same way that some of the more ridiculous claims being made in support of the update to Resolution 133 do. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com