James Mitchell wrote: > As a thought, consider names written in the Arabic script.
Arabic? Isn't Latin/French localization much more than enough to show IDNs are not operational. If not... > Being > a cursive script, how is a TLD applicant expected to separate > 'words' in a top level domain without the use of a hyphen or > equivalent. > Removing the spaces will cause the characters to join, and the > meaning lost (besides which the A-label will contain hyphens > anyway?!). > I'm far from qualified to talk authoritatively on the Arabic > script, or how it will be used in domain names, however I do > know of parties that will be applying for Arabic TLDs - are > we to exclude these applicants? As is explained in wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet arabic letters have four forms, "isolated", "end", "middle" and "beggining" and the form is determined by the location of a letter within a word. Thus, they are not different from Latin distinctions of capital/small letters, which is determined by the location of a letter within a sentence. So, it is an extended case insensitivity problem actively ignored by people working on Unicode. Moreover, as the wikipedia entry says: For compatibility with previous standards, all these forms can be encoded separately in Unicode; however, they can also be inferred from their joining context, using the same encoding. The following table shows this common encoding, in addition to the compatibility encodings for their normally contextual forms (Arabic texts should be encoded today using only the common encoding, but the rendering must then infer the joining types to determine the correct glyph forms, with or without ligation). while separate code points of Unicode are used between different forms, extended case insensitivity between forms of Arabic characters is not specified at all. The situation is even more confusing than Latin/French, which is why I wrote: It should be noted that, extended case insensitivities beyond European characters, such as correspondence between Chinese ones, the problem is even more unsolvable. It is trivially easy to declare some broken specification as IDN 2008 or something like that, but it does not make localized domain names operational. Masataka Oh _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
