Subject: Re: [idn] Fw: Cyrillics - Latin

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 12:13:06 EST

In a message dated 2002-02-04 8:40:29 Pacific Standard Time, [email-masked] 
writes:

> Domain names are character strings, they are not language.  All of this 
> debate pertains to very important issues about language usage.  It is 
> outside the scope of the working group.

Some time ago I brought up the example of three of my favorite search engines:

- google.com
- altavista.com
- teoma.com

I challenged the list to identify -- unambiguously, to the point where it 
could be determined by software -- the language(s) to which the words 
"google," "altavista" (or for that matter "alta vista"), and "teoma" belong.  
Not surprisingly, nobody responded.

For that matter, to what language do the words "idn," "ops," and "ietf" 
belong?  Don't tell me they are abbreviations -- I know that.  My point is 
that Dave is 100% correct; domain names are strings of characters.  If they 
happen to spell one or more words in a natural language, so much the better, 
but that is not primarily what they are.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 (address will soon change to [email-masked])

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 12:11:35 EST

- google.com
- altavista.com
- teoma.com

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California

---

From: Yves Arrouye <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 18:20:21 -0800

> Very good point. I think we did have that justification in the
> distant past, but it was lost along the way. We will add it after the
> WG last call. The reason is that the current DNS has case-insensitive
> matching for current names; if we did not do that for the additional
> characters being added, you would get great user confusion. For
> example, "Abc" matches "abc", but "<Capital-A-with-accent>bc" would
> not match "<lowercase-a-with-accent>bc".
> 
> >Or, in other words,
> >
> >     Are there any reason we can't remove case mapping from
> >     our spec?  (Other than something like "because it is a
> >     natural English convention..." :-)
> 
> Yes, there is a good reason: removing the table would introduce confusion.

But we already know that there may be some confusion at some point, as you
acknowledge a couple days ago, if some later revision of Unicode introduces
new characters with case distinctions (guaranteed for 3.2 IIRC). So this
really needs to be pointed out, so that people realize that it may break at
any time depending on the applications they use. (The optimistic in me
thinks that applications will strive to offer timely updates in order to
offer a better user experience w/o the confusion.)

YA

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From: Kenneth Whistler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 19:03:00 -0800 (PST)

Yves said:

> new characters with case distinctions (guaranteed for 3.2 IIRC).

This is true, but at this point the characters with case distinctions
introduced are truly rare (an archaic Greek koppa not used in modern
Greek, four Cyrillic letters used only in Kildin Sami, eight
Cyrillic letters used only in Komi in an obsolete orthography
no longer in use). And the candidates are getting scarcer and rarer.

> So this

I agree.

By the way, a propos of the note that originally started this thread,
has anyone else actually realized that there really is a

http://www.cobet.ru/

And on the title of the home page, this business consultancy group
playfully posts "COBET.py", illustrating the cross-script dual pun
on "Soviet" and the Paraguayan ccTLD. (They apparently haven't bothered
to also create a www.cobet.py in reality.)

And going back to points made by John, Mark, and others, one should
note that Unicode is not the issue here. *Every* major character encoding
used in Russia includes both ASCII and Cyrillic, and the same well-known
overlaps of Latin letters and Cyrillic letters occur in all of them,
from ISO 8859-5 to Code Page 855 to Windows 1251 to KOI-8 to Mac Cyrillic.

Unless Cyrillic were eliminated from domain names altogether (which
I doubt the Russians, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, and Serbs would be
very happy about), these kinds of visual overlaps will occur.

And as Mark said:

> I don't think a solution is possible in DNS.

--Ken