[vip] Suggested meta-questions to think about

[Andrew Sullivan]

Hi,

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 11:21:43PM +0300, Daniel Kalchev wrote:
> 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.
> 

Yes, I'm glad too.  This is all very helful.

> 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.

Well, any registry publising (for instance) NAPTR records in support
of ENUM will do it, because they always "underscore labels"
(e.g. _sip._udp.example.com).  The underscore is not one of the
hostname characters.  So this is a common use.

> 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.

Variants are, at the very least, script specific.  The problem is that
they're not _only_ script-specific, in that in at least some cases for
a given language using a given script, a variant in that language is
emphatically _not_ a variant for another language using the same
script.  I suppose if this problem were solved easily, none of us
would be working on it!

> 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

That might be a pragmatic rule to adopt.  What we'd be saying, in
effect, is that if there were possible conflicts with others, then the
candidate variant would be ineligible for use in the root (i.e. for
top level names).  But I have not worked out the implications of that
for all the different cases, and it might be very serious.  I think
this is worth investigating, at least.

Thanks for your continued efforts on this vexing topic.

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com