Subject: Re: [idn] Interesting links

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 00:50:19 EST

In a message dated 2002-02-11 18:48:00 Pacific Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> What happen in the WG will bring damage the
> community.

I keep seeing this word, "damage."

Is it really true that providing domain names in Chinese characters, but 
requiring users to enter them exactly as presented (without TC/SC 
equivalencing), would be more damaging to the Chinese user community than the 
current system, which provides no support at all for Chinese characters?

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 (address will soon change to dewell at adelphia dot net)

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From: hoho <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 01:51:18 +0800

Dear Dough,

As several members of the list tried to explain to the group, it is
very difficult to ask a user to enter a Chinese domain names exactly 
in a Unicode input environment. This is because the complexity of 
getting the exact domain name is exponential in the length of a 
domain name. In other words, if there are 10 characters with variants
in a domain name, then there are at least 1,024 different Unicode 
strings corresponding to the same name. It is frustrated for users to
deal with such a high complexity.

Nevertheless,  if ITEF  does approve an IDN technology which does
not solve the variant problem, we believe that there are domain name
holders who pays the registries. This is because they want to keep
their own name and, furthermore, IETF is a respectful organization.
It is going to take a while before they realize that technology is 
not ready.

As for the current system, we have been using it for so many years.
It would be excellent if we could live with domain names in our own 
language. But, it makes no harm even if we have to wait for some 
time before a reasonable solution is provided.

-- Janming Ho