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

[Patrik Fältström]

Thanks Andrew for pointing out some of the errors.

   Patrik

> On 2 nov 2014, at 00:28, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
> 
> 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