[A12n-Collab] Fwd: Feedback needed on letters / symbols in Internationalized Domain Names

["Donald Z. Osborn" <dzo@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI, I'm forwarding this on behalf of Deborah Anderson of UC Berkeley. I
recieved it 4-5 days ago and the deadline for replies was July 1 (sorry).
However I understand that they may still be accepting comments. DZO

*****

Due to computer security issues, a set of guidelines is currently being drafted
that will influence future Internationalized Domain Names (i.e.,
http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu, http://www.deutschland.de/) and
identifiers. The computer security issues that have arisen involve spoofing of
letters or numbers (e.g., in a recent case unsuspecting users were sending
credit card information to "PayPal.com" which was spelled with a capital "I" in
place of lowercase "L", because the two are not visibly distinct in some
fonts). Similarly Cyrillic or Greek letters could be used in lieu of similar
looking Latin letters in domain names.

The current draft (Unicode Technical Report #36, cited below) contains
guidelines that suggest restricting most IPA characters and a variety of other
characters. However, many of these restricted characters might be needed by
local communities when creating Internationalized Domain Names (and
identifiers) in their own script. The results of restricting certain letters
and symbols could affect communities in Africa, North America, and other
locations, since the characters would only be permitted under lenient
security settings.

Note: It is important to distinguish "necessary" orthographic characters from
things that would be "nice to have" for complete orthography. Apostrophes, for
example, would be nice to have in English, but are not *necessary* for domain
names. Since many IPA letters and extended Latin letters are used as parts of
normal orthographies, the committees want to get a sense of which letters
really are going to be required for use such as domain names by user
communities.

Can you please review the list of restricted characters and send comments on
those characters that are needed by user communities?

To do this, check over those characters listed in the following file:
http://unicode.org/draft/reports/tr36/data/draft-restrictions.txt

These lists include a representation of the characters, but the image may not
appear on your screen depending on the fonts installed on your machine;
you may need to use the character code numbers [or names] and refer to the
code charts at http://www.unicode.org/charts/.

Feedback is needed as soon as possible, but preferably **by the first of July.**
Feedback after that point will be considered for the next version of the
document. Comments should be sent via http://unicode.org/reporting.html. Please
look at the notes at the top of the draft-removals.txt file before sending your
feedback. Comments should be specific, e.g., character X is required in common
words in languages X and Y, such as:...

The draft of the guidelines, which explain the reasons for these rules and
provides other information, is contained at:
http://www.unicode.org/draft/reports/tr36/tr36.html.

Please feel free to forward this message to others.

With best regards,

Deborah Anderson

Project Leader
Script Encoding Initiative
(Universal Scripts Project)
Dept. of Linguistics
UC Berkeley

Website: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei 
Email: dwanders(at)berkeley.edu or dwanders(at)pacbell.net



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