Subject: What do you think about internationalisation of DNS?

From: Dan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 12:42:15 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi

The IDN working group have been discussing the requirements for
non-ASCII domain names for a while now. Below is the annoucement
for one draft with a way to handle non-ASCII domain names in DNS.

I am very interested in hearing your comments on it.
The goal  of it is to add non-ASCII domain names in
a controlled manner so it can work together with the
DNS servers that do not know about non-ASCII names and with software
that only expect ASCII in names. And still be possible to start
using immedately without any large query overhead.
To be able to do this, the DNS server must be able to identify
queries coming from non-ASCII aware clients.

The draft includes both the (as I see it) best choice, and some
alternatives to help the discussion.

Regards,

   Dan

---
A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Internationalized Domain Name Working Group of 
the IETF.

	Title		: Using the Universal Character Set in the Domain Name 
                          System (UDNS)
	Author(s)	: D. Oscarsson
	Filename	: draft-ietf-idn-udns-00.txt
	Pages		: 16
	Date		: 10-Jul-00
	
Since the Domain Name System (DNS) [RFC1035] was created there have
been a desire to use other characters than ASCII in domain names.
Lately this desire have grown very strong and several groups have
started to experiment with non-ASCII names.
By using the Universal Character Set (UCS) [ISO10646] this document
updates the Domain Name System so that non-ASCII domain names can be
used while still being compatible with the current (RFC 1035) DNS.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-udns-00.txt

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	"get draft-ietf-idn-udns-00.txt".

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---

From: Mathias Körber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2000 23:34:19 +0800

I elieve DNS INternationlaization may be at firstimpression
a worthy goal, but will in the long term only lead to
nationalization or regionalization of the NEt, or (if we're
lucky) fail and people willfall back again on ASCII.

While it allows many people in the world who don't use
ASCII only character sets to use name in their languages and scripts
in their Internet addresses, it will restrict the actual use of those
addresses to those who can
	a) somewhat understand/distingush them from others
	b) enter them

As a German living and working in Singapore, I have after 10 years not
mastered the Chinese script a single bit. I cannot distinguish
between many characters (most look the same to me), let alone
type them in.

If I got email from someone with a Chinese only name, I would have to save
that address in my address book, and use some private indicator
distingushing the name. (I would most likely use his romanized
name if I knew that, or write something like 'Zhang from <company>'.

But private address books etc are not going to cut it in the long term, as
they would overflow with entries if everyone;s email address had to be saved
to be available later for cut and paste...

In ASCII, I can remenmber (and easily enter) email addresses, webpages, even
if I have them in paperform, saw the, on TV etc. With a URL in Chinese,
Japanese, Mongolian or Thai, it would be impossible for me.

I *do* think that an extension to Latin-1 would be a good thing, as many
languages can be covered by that, which share a large amount of characters
with ASCII, but have *some* own characters. But even there, most languages
have accepted and agreed upon transliterations for those special characters
(in Gernan: ö -> oe etc), that it does not matter very much.

Even other languagas that do not have anything in common with the ASCII or
Latin-1 based scripts have transliterations (eg Hanyu Pinyin for Chinese),
which many native speakers/readers/riters of those languages already learn,
that ASCII still makes for the most usefulk common ground.

As such I think that I18N in the DNS would be a step in the wrong direction,
as it would pave the way for countries and whole regions to isolate their
Internet presence into their regional cultural zone, rather than opening up
ways of communications by using a simple, widely available and understood
common ground, ASCII (or Latin-1)

Mathias

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Dan
> Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2000 6:42 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: What do you think about internationalisation of DNS?
>
>
> Hi
>

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 02:22:54 +0859 ()

Mathias;

> I elieve DNS INternationlaization may be at firstimpression

It is no INternatnalization. It is just an localization.

> distingushing the name. (I would most likely use his romanized

That's why it is just an localization.

As it is just a localization, there is NO international framework
necessary.

But, people working on the international framework won't admit it.

So, just ignore them.

> As such I think that I18N in the DNS would be a step in the wrong direction,

They have been told so a lot of times.

> I *do* think that an extension to Latin-1 would be a good thing,

*YOU* do think so, of course. :-)

Seriously speaking, Latin-1 is utterly broken. Introduction of soft
hypen in Latin-1 completely breaks DNS.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 11:04:30 +0859 ()

> Which is why it's wrong.

Well, as long as it is a localization, it is not wrong.

It is wrong, however, to call it internatinalization and try
to define meaningless frameworks.

It is wrong, too, that international forums such as IETF waste time on
localization issues.

> I do,

As it is localizatin, you can use any encodings, including
Latin-1 (without soft hyphen), without bothering interopeability
to other localization. There can be no interoperability, anyway.
Your localization is assured not to be compatible with localization
preferred in Japan.

But, I have no reason to act against you use Latin-1 locally,
because that's your localization, not mine.

							Masataka Ohta

---

From: Mathias Körber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 09:41:29 +0800

> From: Masataka Ohta [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2000 1:24 AM

Which is why it's wrong.

> *YOU* do think so, of course. :-)

I do, because Latin-1 covers a lot of languages, I believe more languages
than any other system of script. But I did point out that I consider it
not a big problem if this did not happen, as transliterations exist
for many of these languages, as well a others.

---

From: Mathias Körber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 09:42:03 +0800

I think I know the intention quite well.
I think it is only a bit misguided and a step in the wrong
direction.

<flame>
You seem not to understand the use of examples to illustrate
principles (in this case problems the majority of people will
have to recognize, understand, distinguish and be able to use
domainnames in languages in scripts totally foreignto them
<flame>

I think I18N in the DNS will in the long run prove a step in the
wrong direction..

Get a clue, learn some discussion culture.

> From: James Seng [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2000 8:06 AM
> To: Mathias Körber
> Cc: Dan; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: What do you think about internationalisation of DNS?
>
>
> <flame>
> You have misunderstood the intention of I18N of DNS.
>
> 1. get a clue. The world don't revolve around you.
>
> 2. the target audience for IDN is for non-English speaker, and once
>    again not for you.
> </flame>
>
> -James Seng
>
> Mathias Körber wrote:
> >

---

From: James Seng <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 08:06:21 +0800

<flame>

-James Seng

---

From: Mathias Körber <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 16:44:38 +0800

[ ok kiddies.  unless there are actual technical contributions, this is the
last post on this thread i will approve.  -- randy  ]

Nice flames James,

as you are working for a company whose whole business plan
hands on I18S of the DNS, I did not expect you to be open for
dissenting voices. I was right.

> Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2000 4:38 PM
> To: Mathias Körber
> You dont seem to get the idea.
>
> IF you cant read or type the URL or Email address, then obvious you are
> not going to able to read or understand the Website or the Email you
> receiving anyway.
>
> So it is not about _YOU_, it is about _OTHERS_ who need the non-English
> system.
>
> There will and always will be people like who thinks they are center of
> the world and it is okay to force everyone else to learn English to
> accommodate their need. So I hardly see a need to continue this argument
> with you.
>
> -James Seng
>

---

From: James Seng <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 16:38:02 +0800

-James Seng

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 16:24:26 +0900

>hypen in Latin-1 completely breaks DNS.

Interesting. Can you be more specific? What exactly is the problem
with soft hyphen? Can it be avoided if it is excluded from DNS names?
Are there any other such characters, in Latin-1 or elsewhere?

Regards,    Martin.

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 17:31:19 +0900

[ this needs to be moved to the idn mailing list, [email-masked] -- randy ]

Hello Mathias,

At 00/07/15 23:34 +0800, Mathias K$B‹S(Bber wrote:
>nationalization or regionalization of the NEt,

Well, the net is to a large part already nationalized or
regionalized. Most of the content is in a particular language,
and not everybody can read the language. And this is not
just so for the net, it's so for the rest of the world.
As much as we would like, and hope, computer technology
hasn't yet reached the breakthrough in machine translation
that would make this problem go away.

If we accept the fact that contents (web pages, email)
is in various languages, and I hope you accept this,
then we have to think about how to make it easy for
people to find this content. There are a lot of ways
to do that. Search engines and directories for various
languages already abound and show a clear need.

>         a) somewhat understand/distingush them from others

Yes indeed. But is that a problem?

As you may have noticed (I'm not sure about Singapore, though),
in countries with a non-latin script, mail addresses on letters
and packages are in that script as long as it's assumed that both
parties can handle that. This has very clear benefits on various
levels; among else, it's easier not to misspell the address,
it's easier for people to remember it, it's easier for the workers
in the mail service to not make errors, and the recipient feels
personally addressed. In cases where this does not work, a
Latin-based address can always be used.

>between many characters (most look the same to me), let alone

It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, too, for many people
to learn English, even if there are many fewer characters.
English orthography isn't that straightforward at all, and
is often very helpful when typing in an address.
Also, as a Swiss in Japan, with the ability to speak and
read Japanese (and write when I use a computer or dictionary),
I became aware of the fact that the difference that is probably
most difficult to overcome is not to learn characters, but
to get up to full speed. You have spent thousands of hours,
in school and later, looking at Latin script. Compared to that,
somebody in China or Japan has done that for maybe only 1%
of your time. On a billboard with a lot of Chinese and some
Latin, you immediately look at the Latin, while they more
or less ignore it.

Given the problem of having to search
a word on a page of text, I'm sure Chinese and Japanese
perform significantly slower with Latin text (I would guess
something like 3 times slower). It's the same the other
way round (for those of us who can read Chinese or Japanese).
So for many people, it's not a question of whether they know
Latin characters or not, it's a question of whether they
can work at full speed or not.

>name if I knew that, or write something like 'Zhang from <company>'.

It's rather easy to get an MUA to check what language is sent out,
and choose from a list of addresses for the sender the appropriate
address. This is similar to what people do on their own when they
send out a letter or a package. Of course current emailers don't
do that, but future ones will.

>to be available later for cut and paste...

For most of the mails I get, I don't put recipients in my address book,
but just file the mail somewhere. And I just use reply (with a changed
subject) to get back to that person. That would work in that case,
too, but as explained above, we should never get there.

>Japanese, Mongolian or Thai, it would be impossible for me.

Yes indeed. It's just the other way round for Japanese, Chinese,
Mongolians, or Thai. It may seem impossible to you that one of these
scripts is easier to work with than Latin, but script efficiency depends
to a very high percentage (probably 95%) on 'getting used to it, and
getting used to it a lot, and early on in your life', and only for
a very small percentage on what we would call engineering design.
As an example you might be more familiar with, what about the
Blackletter/Fraktur (usually also called Gotisch) style of printing
that was used in Germany maybe up to the generation of your grandmother?
We now have serious difficulties to imagine that people used to it
found that easier to read than the current 'Antiqua' style, but
that was indeed the case.

Of course, such things may very well translate into sales figures
at the end of the day. And I guess there are many cases where
e.g. a Chinese company won't mind not doing business with a few
expatriates if they get a better buyin from their Chinese customers.
And if they still want to market to expatriates, or abroad, they
can always provide an ASCII equivalent host name for their site,
or can set up a site in English (or German, French,...).

>(in Gernan: $B‹(B-> oe etc), that it does not matter very much.

Latin-1 would indeed cover quite a few languages, but not those
that need it most. German/French/Spanish/...-speaking people are
used to the Latin script, and therefore have much less difficulties
with ASCII than people from Asia used to different scripts.
Also, as you say, for example for German, transliteration is
rather easy, but for languages written with other scripts, it's
not at all. As an example, the electronics company Toshiba writes
itself Toshiba in Latin, and that's what they use as a domain name,
but the official transcription is something like 'To^siba' (the ^
going on the 'o'), what many Japanese type in when they input
the Kanji is 'toushiba', if you want to come close in pronunciation,
it's maybe Tohshiba, for German, it would be Tohschiba, and so on.
And similar for many other languages and companies. With Kanji,
there are no such problems at all.

>that ASCII still makes for the most usefulk common ground.

First, Pinyin comes with accents not being part of ASCII. Second,
many people in the southern regions of China have problems with
Pinyin, because it's based on the standard Beijing dialect.
Third, it can happen (in particular when you remove the accents)
that several names are collapsed into a single one.
Fourth, while pinyin is learned in school, it's just tought
at a certain grade, but not widely and regularly practiced.
That means that the efficiency arguments I made above fully
apply.

>common ground, ASCII (or Latin-1)

Latin-1 is definitely not a common ground, although in some regions
of the world, some people might get that impression.
And the question is not isolation or opening up, it's
how to open up while being efficient by being able to
keep well-learned conventions as long as they don't
bother anybody else. Would the fact that some Chinese
use Chinese domain names for Chinese web sites bother
you, if that web site also has an ASCII-only address?

In conclusion, I think there are some potential problems,
but they are minor, and easy to address, and nothing that
people aren't familiar with from other experiences in
their daily life. On the other hand, there are quite some
advantages for a lot of people, not so much with respect
to can vs. cannot, but can with ease vs. can with
(serious) difficulties.

Regards,   Martin.