Erik van der Poel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Other communities have other needs. I've been told that some > communities use a set of letters that are currently encoded in two > different ranges of the Unicode space (e.g. Latin and Cyrillic). > Today, my idea is that these communities can "occupy" their "own" part > of the DNS space, for example a .tld or a .2ld.tld. They can publish > the rules that they enforce in their registries, and then the browsers > can either allow any character sequence in those labels or check them > to see if the rules were indeed followed.
I've also thought along these lines, but I rejected this approach. The domain hierarchy is ultimately based on delegation of naming authority, and trying to use it for any other purpose will run into conflicting constraints. Suppose country X wants to support language Y, which is used in many countries around the world. Who would be the registry for the Y domain, and how would you get worldwide agreement on that? Would country X be delegated a subdomain of Y? Would registrants accept X.Y as a legitimate country X domain, or would they demand to be in an X top-level domain? Would users of language Y not get annoyed at seeing Y at the end of almost every domain name they use? It's bad enough that so many domains end in .com, imagine if they all ended in .com.lat (for "Latin"). I still like the idea of allowing every TLD to have one synonym-TLD per script, although we might need to recognize some scripts in addition to the Unicode scripts, for example, the subset-of-(Latin-plus-Cyrillic) script that you allude to. AMC
