Off of the "Low Down" on DNJournal

[Prodigy]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/web-c...871392720.html

Paul Twomey, the President and CEO of ICANN, said today that rushing to add non-English characters to domain names could literally break the Internet. Twomey said ICANN (who is in charge of the global domain name system) is under a lot of political pressure to quickly make domain names available using local alphabets around the world but that more testing is needed to make sure that can be accomplished while allowing the Internet to continue to work without problems. Domains that use foreign characters (known as International Domain Names) currently use an underlying puny code that consists of standard English characters. If ICANN works the technical issues out (which they are expected to do before the end of 2007), puny codes will not be necessary and a true multi-cultural Internet DNS will emerge. Twomey, a native Australian, made his comments while speaking today in Sydney.
Posted Nov. 21, 2006


So does this mean when "Puny codes will not be necessary" we are going to lose our investments in current IDNs? Because that's what we've been purchasing right?

[blastfromthepast]

Why is every other news story about this nonsense?

[Rubber Duck]

Regurgitated nonsense. How many times does he expect to collect a fee for delivering the same tired old crap!

[bwhhisc]

Not clear what his issue is....."unicode" resolves to punycode- all Latin A thru Z plus Numbers and Hypen. This should fit within the existing system; he needs to listen to the "engineering" side of things and get moving towards DNAME.

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by bwhhisc

Not clear what his issue is....."unicode" resolves to punycode- all Latin A thru Z plus Numbers and Hypen. He needs to listen to the "engineering" side of things and get moving towards DNAME.

Despite the characteristic lack of clarity it is first level implementation that he is rattling on about here. He has done us a huge disservice in the short-term as he has single handedly managed to confuse the hell out of everyone. In the medium term, he either gets it right or everyone will soon have forgotten who he is.

[Drewbert]

He's talking about what SHOULD have happened - years ago when the subject first came up.

The upgrade of DNS software worldwide to take unicode requests without applications having to convert them to punycode first.

If/when this does happen (if ever, now), I would expect current punycode holders would be granfathered into the new unicode based domain names.

[blastfromthepast]

Originally Posted by Drewbert

He's talking about what SHOULD have happened - years ago when the subject first came up.

The upgrade of DNS software worldwide to take unicode requests without applications having to convert them to punycode first.

Which is what IE6 supports: utf-8 domain names.

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by blastfromthepast

Which is what IE6 supports: utf-8 domain names.

Yes, this is the lame argument that Microshaft hang their hats on. They assumed that you would just be able to input Unicode into address bar. Nobody it seems told them otherwise, and clearly they felt no responsibility to check that this would be the case. Or may be they have been deliberately trying to sabotage the non-English internet?