[UA-discuss] Managing IDN Variant

[Asmus Freytag]

On 2/8/2019 8:10 PM, John Levine wrote:
> In article <370933817.844561549679203331.JavaMail.root at mx2.datainfosys.com> you write:
>> -=-=-=-=-=-
>>
>> Dear All,
>>
>> ICANN announced the release of the Recommendations for Managing Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) Variant Top-Level Domains (TLDs) as a collection of six documents.
> Keep in mind that this is just about what (if any) variants to allow as TLDs.  It's not very
> relevant to the variants of registered names within contracted domains.
>
> For example, TLDs can't contain digits, but registered names can.
>
The focus on "variants" is a bit misleading here. The Root Zone LGR 
effort covers *repertoire selection* and *required context rules* as 
well as the *definition of variants*. This will be even more apparent 
when the next batch of scripts gets added.

Now, the Root Zone has some specific restrictions, particularly the 
"letter principle" which restricts the allowable repertoire to "letters" 
and therefore excludes digits and hyphen for ASCII (or their analogues 
for other scripts - even if PVALID).

However, the various script LGRs for the Root Zone constitute an 
excellent starting point and reference for any LGR for other public 
zones in the same script. Relaxing the restrictions to allow digits, for 
example, would constitute a rather minor effort compared to the work 
that went into researching and refining the repertoire, each involving 
teams up to thirty linguists and technical experts depending on the 
script, sometimes working over several years.

In some case, the respective panel analyzed the requirements of almost 
200 different languages to arrive at a repertoire that maximizes the 
coverage for meaningful mnemonics while excluding unused, unfamilar and 
other risky, yet unneeded characters.

Just because they are not "turn-key" for some other zone is a poor 
reason to disregard their value as reference and starting points.

A./

PS: any public zone supporting more than one script would be 
well-advised to study and implement the cross-script variants defined in 
the RZ-LGR.

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