New Name Registry Using Unicode

From: tom@bluesky.org
Date: Thu Sep 28 2000 - 11:54:56 EDT


Readers of this list may be interested in efforts to set up an upper-level
internet name registry (XNS) based on XML 1.0, Unicode 2.0, and Java 1.2,
which intends to allow names composed with a large subset of Unicode 2.0
characters.

Info is at

<http://www.xns.org>

Below are details of the name specification from their "white papers":

=========================================================================

In XNS 1.0, XNS personal, business, and general names all follow the same
normalization rules:

1.

Names can be up to 64 characters of XML text (Unicode 2.0 characters as
defined by the W3C XML 1.0 specification).

2.

For purposes of name representation, all characters are legal except the
XNS global namespace prefix characters "=", "@", "+", the namespace
delimiter character "/", and the XML markup tag delimiter characters "<"
and "">".

3.

For purposes of name registration uniqueness, the only significant
characters are numbers and letter as defined by the Java isLetterOrDigit
function returning TRUE. This function determines if a character is a
letter or digit according to the Unicode 2.0 standard (category "Lu", "Ll",
"Lt", "Lm", "Lo", or "Nd" in the Unicode specification data file). For the
full specification, see Gosling, Joy, and Steele, The Java Language
Specification.

4.

Letters in the ASCII range are normalized to lower case. (In XNS 1.0, case
normalization is not applied in to any other Unicode character range.)

To illustrate these rules, the following name representations all normalize
to the same name:

John Doe, Jr.

John Doe Jr

JohnDoeJr

johndoejr



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