[UA-discuss] truly international IDNs, was Armenia

John Levine john.levine at standcore.com
Tue Feb 12 20:32:54 UTC 2019


In article <af160a09-c0c4-d981-55fd-acf56c5aae3b at isoc.am>,
Lianna Galstyan <lianna at isoc.am> wrote:
>So that when someone puts the name of the domain name and then needs to 
>add ․հայ (TLD extension), if this dot is written in Armenian script 
>(this non-standard dot is a default dot in Armenian keyboard), it's 
>considered by servers to be an unknown symbol and the domain name 
>doesn't resolve and show the exact address. This means, that the user 
>should change the keyboard to the Latin, put the dot, then change the 
>keyboard again to write in Armenian. ...

This is a a well known problem for IDNs, but not one we have dealt
with.

The first version of IDNA (IDNA2003) included a set of character
mappings that was supposed to work everywhere.  In fact, it worked OK
in western Europe and maybe Japan, but people in other places ran into
the problems you're seeing, characters that make sense in your
language but that don't work in the generic mapping.

The second version of IDNA, IDNA2008, recognized this problem and
deliberately removed all the mappings.  The idea was that experts in
different scripts and languages would create mappings that make sense
for people who use those scripts and speak those languages.  The
mappings would turn the user into into standardized U-labels that the
IDN software can then use.

Unfortunately, the Unicode Consortium didn't get the memo and
published UTR46 which provides a few more generic input mappings,
which have the same problems as the IDNA2003 mapping.  At this point,
all the web browsers use those generic mappings.

If there were an Armenian mapping for IDNs, when the characters in a
domain name are Armenian, it handles Armenenian punctuation, and when
the characters are Latin, Latin punctuation.  Then the browser or app
could apply the Armenian mapping when the user's input language is
Armenian.  Unfortunately, the Armenian mapping does not exist yet.

This is a problem the UASG could work on, by bringing together IDN
experts and language and script experts to create mappings that work
for languages where the generic mappings don't.

Regards,
John Levine, john.levine at standcore.com




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