Re: [ga] On Its Way: One of the Biggest Changes to the Internet

["Ram Mohan" <rmohan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Danny, all,

> (1) Will e-mail work between an IDN domain and an
> ASCII domain?
There should be no problem sending and receiving normal mails to and from 
IDN TLDs.  After all, they will reduce to their appropriate Punycode, which 
should through the mail system just fine.
The unanswered larger issue is the inability of current mail systems to 
handle local scripts to the left of the "@" symbol.  Much work is going on 
in the IETF to build a protocol that aids this.  So - at this time, you 
can't really do <localscript>@<localscript>.IDN and expect it to work 
seamlessly all over the web.
> (2) If the current WHOIS system only accomodates
> ASCII, will the WHOIS properly function in an IDN
> environment?
This is already the case with IDNs at the 2nd level.  Nothing really new at 
the top level - Port 43 (ASCII) responses will return just punycode 
responses.  Web-based whois responses are dependent upon how the website is 
configured.  For example, both www.pir.org and www.afilias.info will 
automatically show the local script based Whois name for a 2nd level IDN 
domain name, in addition to the Punycode (ascii) version.
I've suggested in the past 
(http://www.icann.org/presentations/mohan-whois-carthage-29oct03.pdf) that 
web-based Whois displays should accomodate simple HTML based methods that 
aid native display - for example, by using html escapes/character reference 
(for example, &#1234) -- so this would be like:
whois.info
domain: xn--punycode.info
domain (native form): &#1234;&#2345;&#3456;.info

Numerous other usability issues exist, including some interesting ones such 
as searchability of IDN names and IDN TLDs.
-Ram
-----------------------------------------------
Ram Mohan
rmohan@xxxxxxxxxxxx | m: +1.215.431.0958