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Re: [ga] potential IDN issue with Greek language


Dear Sotiris,
Greece has just registered in Francophonie (the [also] French speaking States) not to speak French but as the only State level language organization. But you are right, we are really to pay attention to the matter, which is subject to a strange important threat.


As you know we need language tags to describe Web pages, etc. This is the W3C to standardize HTML, XML, semantic web. They use the RFC 3066 tags. RFC 3066 describes the tags as adding ISO 639 code, and countries ISO 31066 codes.

The current RFC 3066 does not address all the needs of W3C (in particular the documentation of the scripting). They therefore have presented a Draft where they addressed most of their needs to replace RFC 3066. But that RFC is also a Best Common Practice (BCP 045), so the Draft would replace it - if accepted by the IESG - and become the Internet universal way of managing languages on the Internet. That Draft has several propositions which would only permit full interinteligility if there was one single universal [multi]language being used. This can be the case if all the participants to an exchange use the same language(s) - for example because everyone is to use M$ character set (Word uses UTF-16 as does Java) and (default?) language version. This would lead to a poor multilingual support favoring either the use of a basic English default or of proprietary valued added solutions.

During the IESG Last Call (which alerted me), I opposed a _general_use_ of this proposition. It was over reacted by the authors of the Draft and the private list set-up to support the IANA entries documented by the RFC 3066. This lead a real debate and I hope the IESG will not approve the Draft. However there is an urgent need to cover. I really think this is a matter for this GNSO and @large oriented list for good reasons:
- the authors refused to consider the DNS issue and the IDN tables.
- they want to stick to ISO 3166 rather than to its actual ccTLD delegations creating conflict possibilities
- this is a key element for the IRI definition (every scripting supported in URI and URL) which is necessary to everyone
- our own cultures, our personal intellectual liberty are at stake, the defense of 20.000 languages and dialects, the right to have our own legal and IPR systems not as a carbon copy of the same WIPO/WTO/US laws - and of a semantic web and network which works whatever the source of the program we use.


We have engaged a project named "CulturaMundi" to look how to freely and openly tagging/documenting the cultures and therefore their languages in a way appropriate to DNS, W3C, web services interactions, etc.
jfc


At 09:07 14/01/2005, Sotiris Sotiropoulos wrote:

It appears that the IETF's rationale behind the current IDN framework is best summed up by the following approach:

"Start with the entire Unicode set, and eliminate only characters that can be explicitly demonstrated as being harmful. This is often referred to as the "exclusion-based" model, because you begin with all possible elements, and make decisions to exclude. Neither model/principle automatically makes the right per-character, or per-script, or per-block, decisions; it just provides a framework for the difficult cases. (A reminder: these points refer to the definition of "Internationalized Host Names", which might be considered a separate and distinct IETF work item, to be undertaken in parallel with the standardization of "Internationalized Domain Names")."

[ quoted from: http://www.icann.org/committees/idn/idn-codepoint-paper.htm ]

I think the issue with the Greek language IDNA protocol which I pointed out is definitely harmful.

Be Well,

Sotiris

Sotiris Sotiropoulos wrote:

I have observed the following (what I believe to be) shortcoming in the functioning of the IDN standard(s) as applied to the Greek language. It appears that one can register a name in lower case Greek characters, and then still be able to go ahead and register the same name in capital letters separately. Of course, this also means that one can register mixed capital variations of a name as well. Methinks this is not something to be desired by potential IDN registrants in the non-ascii Greek language.
Sotiris Sotiropoulos

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