ICANN Announces An Important Step Toward the Implementation of IDN Top-Level Domains: New Versions of IDNA Protocol Revision Proposals Posted
26 November 2007
Revised papers of the technical standards that define the implementation of IDNs — the standards are called IDNA — were recently released via the IETF editors. These revisions are an important step toward the delegation of IDN top-level domains.
An informal expert panel, working as what the IETF calls a "design team," evaluated experiences gained in the implementation of the previous version of IDNA since its introduction in 2003, and identified several key areas of future work. These key areas were described in several documents that triggered a formal revision of the IDNA protocol. New versions of the internet-drafts proposing the revisions to the IDNA protocol have been released and are as follows:
The core components in the revision effort include:
- definition of valid IDN labels, an inclusion-based model that clearly defines which characters will be available for IDNs (the current model is exclusion-based), and recognizes the implications of the Unicode handling of various scripts on use in IDNs;
- elimination of confusing and non-reversible character mappings;
- fixing an error in right-to-left error in Stringprep (a profile used to prepare IDNs in the IDNA protocol ), and eliminating Unicode version dependencies, thereby permitting more scripts to be used in IDNs now and in the future.
The issues with the current IDN model that led to these revisions are discussed in RFC4690. This RFC discusses specific character issues where the same script is used in different languages, issues related to cases where languages can be expressed by using more than one script, issues involving bi-directional cases, and issues concerning the topic of visually confusing characters.
ICANN urges the Internet technical community to take part in the final stages of this development work by reviewing this documentations and constructively commenting on it. The review is moving forward in accordance with standard IETF processes. The intention is to finalize this work and publish the new IDNA standard within the next two months.
About MINC
Formed in 2000, MINC is the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium, aims to promote a multilingual Internet through the facilitation of research development, education and deployments of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and other naming systems of Internet navigation. MINC’s work dates back to mid 90’s to promote the Multilingualization of the Internet, the internationalization of Internet names including but not limited to multilingual Internet domain names and keywords. Over the years, MINC has established a wide range of links with international organizations, stakeholder organizations and other processes including The United Nations, the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), ICANN, ITU, WIPO, IETF, as well as language groups such as JDNA (Japanese), CDNA (Chinese), INFITT (Tamil), Euro-LINC (European Languages), CYINC (Cyrillic), GLWG (Georgian), RLWG (Russian ) as well as The Arabic language and scripts WG (Arabic) and ULWG (Urdu). Our language groups develop their own language and variant tables, and coordinate with each other on these tables. They also discuss other IDN related issues like the development of Dispute Resolution Policies and the use of IDN in software applications. For more information about MINC, please refer to the website at http://www.minc.org or contact MINC secretariat at sec07@minc.org.
About MINC ICMC
Formed in 2006, MINC's International Coordination Mechanism Council (ICMC) aims to coordinate with all local authorities and jurisdictions and known operators of IDN TLDs in various local jurisdictions, for a an equitable multilingual Internet and information society based on mutual respect, local empowerment and the right of all people for self-E-determination as a function of their human rights.
ICMC Technical Coordination;
This MINC ICMC ad hoc committee coordinates the technical parameters involved in supporting a truly multilingual domain name system. All deployments of IDN should be Internet RFC- compliant and registered and tracked with MINC's IDN database.