Re: [idn] Using draft-jseng-idn-admin-01.txt

["James Seng" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Hilde,

> It looked rather interesting as a language to express a policy in if
> there is characters that could be seen as variants of each other. As I'm
> from a Norwegian background I've looked at using the guidelines in the
> draft to describe an administrative domain name policy for the Norwegian
> language, with a language character variant table.

To be exact, you can break the document into two sections:

a) How to generate variants of an IDN?
b) How do you handle all these variants?

For (a), the document describe a mechanism using language variants tables
and also an aglorithm to generate variants. This designed specifically for
CJK so I am not sure much Norwegian can use the same concept.

For (b), the document describe a mechanism of an IDN Package (IDL), how this
is registered, transferred, deleted, activiated, de-activated etc. I believe
this would be more or less consistent across different languages.

> Having tried to use it, I have a few questions concerning the
interpretation
> of the different groups in the language character variant table. As far as
I
> can see the recommended variants must also be valid codepoints, and result
> in domain names that are in the zonefile, while character variants are
merely > reserved when a valid combination is registered and are not in
themselves
> added to the zonefile. In addition, character variants that aren't valid
> codepoints can't be the "starting point" for an IDL package.

Yes, recommended variants usually are also valid codepoint.

> In other words, given a language character variant table where the letters
> a-z is among the valid codepoints, but does not have any recommended
variants > or character variants (except the letter itself), and the
following lines in
> addition:
>
> 00F8; 00F8; 00F6;
> 00F6; 00F8; 00F8;
> (ø; ø; ö;
>  o; ø; ø;)

Yes.

> If I've understood correctly an application for the domain name bjørn.no
> will result in an IDL package consisting of bjørn.no and björn.no, where

> bjørn.no is added to the zonefile and björn.no is reserved. (As the ø is
the
> recommended variant, while the poor ö is just a character variant).

Yes.

> What
> happens according to this policy if the domain name applied for is
björn.no?
> Will the registered name still be bjørn.no while björn.no is reserved?

If björn.no is registered, then the zone file {ZV} will have two entry,
björn.no and bjørn.no. The first is because the registered names always get
into the zone file. The latter is because it is the recommended variant.

> And if the language table only had a-z and
>
> 00F8; 00F8; 00F6;
> (ø; ø; ö;)
>
> would that mean that while one could still apply for bjørn.no (and get
> björn.no as a reserved name), someone applying for björn.no would get
> rejected as that name contains a character that is not part of the valid
> codepoints?

Yes. Since ö is not in the entry of the first column (valid code point), it
björn.no will not be allowed to be registered.

> Sorry for asking the basic questions :-) but as the draft states, the
> quality of the language table is critical for the result... which means
that
> the logic behind how the table is built is important.

Not a problem at all. But having said all these, I like to reminded you
again that the algorithm is designed for CJK. If it works for Norwegian, it
occurs not by design. If there is another algorithm to generate variants
which is more suitable for Norwegina, I am very interested to know.

> And while I'm asking questions, has any of you in the WG used the draft
for
> creating a draft policy for a language?

Yes. The JET (CNNIC, TWNIC, KRNIC, JPNIC) are using this document as a
base-line for registration of CJK.

-James Seng