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[council] Very interesting - CircleID: Examining the Proposed Internationalization of TLDs -
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- Subject: [council] Very interesting - CircleID: Examining the Proposed Internationalization of TLDs -
- From: "sophiabekele" <sophiabekele@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:39:50 -0800
- Reply-to: "sophiabekele@xxxxxxxxx" <sophiabekele@xxxxxxxxx>
- Sender: owner-council@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Dear All,
I am sending this article for your interest.
I do not know James, and had no idea he had the same views as I have been
expressing these past couple of weeks until I saw the article.
Regards,
Sophia
"Examining the Proposed Internationalization of TLDs"
By: James Seng, Nov 30, 2004
http://www.circleid.com/posts/examining_the_proposed_internationalization_o
f_tlds/
Last month, John Klensin wrote an article published here on CircleID
regarding Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Top Level Domains (TLD).
Based on his Internet Draft, John suggests using language translation in the
application for TLD. The advantage of this method is that all existing TLDs
can now be represented in any number of languages without additional need
for ICANN to create new TLD.
While this sounds like a clean solution to the IDN TLD problem, I don’t
think it is viable for the following five reasons:
1. Similar idea has been proposed in the IETF IDN Working Group for IDN (See
uname and vidn). While John proposal has some minor technical differences,
the fact that these similar ideas has been considered and discarded by the
IDN Working Group is worth noting1.
2. One of the differences of John proposal is that translations are only
done only for TLDs. 2nd Level Domain (2LD) and others remains using IDNA
(RFC 3490). From a technical design perspective, such exemption handling are
not desirable; it isn’t “keep it short and simple” (KISS)2.
Bear in mind that IDNs are fundamental identifiers also used embedded into
other technical protocols (e.g. URL, URI, Email Address, Jabber Address, SIP
Address), such inconsistency would introduce additional complexity in other
Internet protocols.
3. In the article, John said:
The country-code list changes only very slowly. ICANN plans for the generic
name list to grow moderately, but not dramatically, in the foreseeable
future. Maintaining a translation table in which around 300 names are kept
together with convenient local forms is a fairly simple matter of
programming.
While that is technical true, getting the translation table into the
application is a big challenge itself as we witness how long it took IDNA to
be adopted by browser. In fact, after nearly 2 years, Internet Explorer
still lacks IDNA support although we know now it is in its roadmap.
draft-klensin-idn-tld also propose that “We suggest that c authors of
applications programs may want to maintain a table that contain lists of
TLDs and locally-desirable names for each one”
But it fails to mention how the table is going to be managed and later
updated. Will every applications needs to be updated or download a new text
file whenever ICANN adds a new TLD? Who will decide what’s the ‘locally
desirable names”?
Dealing with such problem with a single text file (e.g. TLD.TXT)
downloadable from IANA may seem viable in the short run. But in the long
run, just like we can’t cope with HOST.TXT back in 1980s which resulted in
the creation of DNS, a TLD.TXT will not scale and we will inevitably fall
back to using some sort of directory look-up mechanism, or worst,
reinventing DNS.
4. Translation is also a fairly instable with variation based on local and
language. And names of countries are even trickier. For example Singapore,
officially name is 新加坡 but it is often shorten to be 新国 or 星國.
Such inconsistency is not acceptable in a DNS protocol where uniqueness is
critical. You just cant ask your user to type in 新国 or星國,
depending which application they using or which locale they using.
I am quite sure these problems exist for all languages, regardless for
country names or generic names. Just for fun, try getting a group of your
favorite linguists to translate .COM and .BIZ, and then step back, get lots
of donuts and diet cokes and watch the show.
5. While this is the last reason I am going to give you, and I am sure there
are more, it is the most important one too and perhaps the easiest to
understand. If you can’t remember the above four technical reasons, then
just remember this one:
How on earth is the Internet community going to explain to the rest of the
world that a single company is going to control all .COM in their language?
IDN TLD is important and many groups are already asking for one. Some more
important then others, like Arabic Domain Names is horrible to use when
mixed with Latin TLD. However, ICANN cannot shy away from releasing IDN TLD
by using such technical short-cut, by moving their burden to the
applications developers.
If ICANN indeed is indeed the responsible for “generic and country code
Top-Level Domain name system managed” (quote ICANN ), then do so, and make
it count.
1 A detail discussion why so those proposals were rejected is an article on
its own...some day perhaps.
2 IDNA is design to apply to all internationalized labels, regardless
whether it is TLD, 2LD, 3LD etc, in accordance to the KISS principle.
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