[vip] [Blog Post] Making Progress on Internationalized Domain Names

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Sat, Nov 01, 2014 at 10:32:12PM +0000, Fahd Batayneh wrote:
> https://www.icann.org/news/blog/making-progress-on-internationalized-domain-
> names

That posting contains at least one pretty glaring error: "In 2010,
hostnames used in the DNS were limited to a subset of the American
Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters used for
alphabetic letters, digits, and the hyphen (known as "LDH")."  RFC
3490, "Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)", was
published in 2003 (which is why it's now informally called
"IDNA2003").  There were doubtless some concerns with IDNA2003, but
forcing everone to use LDH was not among its faults.

There are other things about the posting that are pretty strange:

First, I have no idea what Russ's OpenStand blog posting has to do
with IDNA.  

Second, "While these numbers represent significant progress, there is
still more work to be done to ensure people around the world can
access the Internet in their local language."  For most people, there
is _no problem at all_ accessing the Internet in a local language.
HTML and HTTP have included language and encoding negotiation
effectively forever.  Email bodies have been internationalizable since
the publication of MIME, and even very old mail user agents have been
able to cope with that -- I recall using pine on a
conservatively-administered SunOS machine in the 1990s and being able
to read internationalized mail bodies.  The problem that IDNA solves
is the internationalization of (mostly server) identifiers on the
Internet.  The problem that EAI (internationalized email) solves is
internationalizing the local-part of the mail address (the ajs in
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com), and nothing else.  These are both important
advances, but it hardly does anyone any service to overplay their
importance in the same way that some of the more ridiculous claims
being made in support of the update to Resolution 133 do.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com