[vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

[Daniel Kalchev]

Hi Andrew,

I am glad to have provoked this discussion, because I believe many of the study groups members will benefit from more clarification as to what are the specific goals and restrictions in our work.

Before going any further, I need to state, that my comments intentionally try to avoid any examples, as my intention is to provoke other study group members to check if these concerns apply to their scripts/languages without influencing/constraining this with specific cases.

We seems to agree on what a registry is. I too have mostly technical background and 20 years of running one.

I also tend to agree with you on the fact that only a subset of permitted octets is used in DNS. But I still fail to see why a DNS registry at any level would want to not comply with the lowest common denominator (the hostname character limits). Same applies to variants. But see at the end.

Your comments on label based variants is completely correct.

We might say that in some languages (but not others) using certain scripts, some characters may have been ASCII-ized, usually by removing additional character elements (good example is the Russian E with dots and without). This convention however is strictly language specific. Another language, that uses the same script might not use the same character ASCII-fication, but instead use different variant character(s). Can we declare in such cases that variants are character based and script specific? Let's see what other members of the study groups see.

What worries me is the short timeframe we have to complete our work. I have to agree here with Cary Karp, that we may have to postpone this work for another study/working group in the future.

One possible way to quicker complete our work is to make the assumption, that 'variants' do not include any language specific word variants and that variants are all character and script based. 
We might restrict ourself to only possible application of variants in an ICANN IDN TLD process. After all, at the root level the language is never known. Other DNS levels will remain different.
This would mean, that a character variant in one script must be valid for any and all languages that use the same script. Otherwise, we ignore it. (and leave it for another study)


Best Regards,
Daniel