From: Philippe VERDY (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2005 - 15:29:19 CST
Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> a écrit :
> I mean, really. IDN is for, among others, the Chinese. Who is going
> to maintain the "list of confusables" for Extension B and Extension
> C1 and all?
There are more, see:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/idn/registered.htm
Currently, you should add Japanese, Korean, but also Polish and Thai ccTLDs that have requested to ICANN a registration of their Language table (but Poland also requests support for Arabic, Greek, Hebrew languages) to support IDN in their registry.
Also there are profiles in gTLDs (worldwide):
.biz, .info, following the initial introduction in .museum (for Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish)...
For now there no issue with Cyrillic/Greek against Latin. These all seem theorical, or if such problems exist with some domains (in .com for example, .net about to change soon to include IDN support with the new registry delegation), they are not formally authorized, given that this usage is still not documented as requested by ICANN.
The only issue that exist now are between the basic Greek and Cyrillic small letters and Latin letters in the proposed IDN support for the .pl registry.
See: http://www.dns.pl/IDN/draft-bartosiewicz-idn-pltld-06.txt
(an IETF draft signed by the .PL TLD)
The Polish Latin small letters are already effective in .PL since last September, just followed by German letters, and other Latin-1 and Extended-Latin-A letters referenced in this document.
Problems however may exist now since November in .PL as Greek, Hebrew and Arabic subsets have been released. And on the next 26th of February, the Cyrillic subset will be open.
For details about what the .PL registry proposes now, see (English version) this page:
http://www.dns.pl/IDN/idn_intro_eng.html
And the relevant document for domain registrants:
http://www.dns.pl/IDN/allowed_character_sets.pdf
I don't know however if reservations that can be requested now have been served (i.e. if registration of IDN names have become effective). For now the online reservation form accepts ASCII-only labels (possibly by using the ACE form only, starting by "xn--").
These are probably things that will be discussed in early March, in Minneapolis for the IETF 62 meeting, and in Mar Del Plata (Argentina) for the ICANN meeting in early April, just followed by the RIPE meeting in Stockholm.
China, Japana and Korea have already adopted a common draft policy for solving possible issues when registering IDN names. See RFC3743. The main idea is the concept of "IDL package", where one register one name in the package, and all other names are made reserved, and not registerable by anyone else than the package owner (who may apply for activating additional variants in the same package).
May be the .COM TLD registry should consider this important contribution, or it will be forced to do it by ICANN...
Conclusion: all this discussion here is going nowhere. This is not a problem of Unicode, but of ICANN, the IETF and the policies of TLD registries...
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