[UA-discuss] Language - how do you refer to non-ASCII to a non-technical audience?

Andrew Sullivan ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
Fri Jul 29 20:34:57 UTC 2016


On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 02:32:14PM +0000, Andre Schappo wrote:
>Unicode Domain Name indicates that the Domain Name can be composed of characters across the range of available Unicode characters and thus multiple human language scripts.
>

Of course, it has the notable disadvantage that it isn't true.  For
instance, IDNA doesn't permit emoji.

> For a single term for non techies (actually for most techies as well) I would go for and have used many times myself the term "non-English Domain Names".

I know I've already said it, but suggesting that traditional LDH
domain names are in "English" reinforces a pernicious myth that has
caused a great deal of trouble already.  A big part of the confusion
exposed in the Variant Issues Project was attributable to this
extremely bad idea that domain names are "in English", and the
attempts by many people to make rules requiring linguistic clues for
domain names is hurting the very deployability that this project is
supposed to care about.  For there is literally no way to make
linguistic rules that aren't subject to attacks, which tends to
encourage exactly the sort of in-client responses that prevent the
acceptance we want.

This is why talking about "your way of writing" or similar kinds of
things are better.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com


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