Re: [idn] Re: character tables

["Adam M. Costello" <[e-mail]>]

Erik van der Poel <[e-mail]> 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