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alpha
9th June 2006, 11:28 AM
As we all know there appears to be no minimum length of an IDN, ie a single character is acceptable, and many many have been registered.

however I was somewhat bemused by the statement on centralnic's website: http://www.centralnic.com/register/idn


Rules for IDN domain names
IDN domains may only contain characters from a single script - you cannot mix them.
IDN domains must be between 3 and 64 characters long.
IDN domains may not contain characters are neither alphanumeric nor ideographic language characters, such as typographic and pictographic dingbats
IDN domains may not contain characters from the following scripts: Braille, Inherited, Linear B

CentralNic's policy is comply with ICANN's IDN guidelines wherever possible.

Rubber Duck
9th June 2006, 11:36 AM
As we all know there appears to be no minimum length of an IDN, ie a single character is acceptable, and many many have been registered.

however I was somewhat bemused by the statement on centralnic's website: http://www.centralnic.com/register/idn


Rules for IDN domain names
IDN domains may only contain characters from a single script - you cannot mix them.
IDN domains must be between 3 and 64 characters long.
IDN domains may not contain characters are neither alphanumeric nor ideographic language characters, such as typographic and pictographic dingbats
IDN domains may not contain characters from the following scripts: Braille, Inherited, Linear B

CentralNic's policy is comply with ICANN's IDN guidelines wherever possible.

I think what they are actually selling is sub-domains so the rules maybe somewhat different although they do appear to be selling punycode. Don't forget that punycode by definition always has a minimum of 7 characters. The ICANN DNS at the moment only recognises Punycode at the second level. I don't believe that it is recognised at the third or in subdirectories just as it is not at the Top Level. The third level punycode is probably being resolved within their own servers.

Frankly, this is not much value to a speculator, but is interesting to see how many people are scrambling to get onboard the IDN phenomenon.

The problem as I see it here is that these are only really suitable for Latin names with diacretic marks as although DNAME will alias the top level, I cannot see the second level being aliased into local script except for ccTLDs.

rhys
9th June 2006, 05:15 PM
I guess that spells doom for all my linear B domains ;)