Summary
Internationalization Open Discussion List
This is an open mailing list for discussion of issues related to internationalization.
Internationalization and Localization are two common aspects of user-facing systems which span locales. Efforts in these two areas typically handle how to appropriately represent data in a specific context and how to carry it between contexts. Work in this area involves complex tradeoffs along multiple dimensions, and there is rarely a single right answer.
A number of Internet protocols and systems rely on matching a known item for operation; when these lack access to locale or the facilities to process locale, they may fail or produce surprising results in the presence of multiple character composition methods. User names, passwords, and domain labels can each present this problem. One of the most pressing issues for the general problem space noted above is resolving how internationalized names stored in the domain name system can be understood without a locale or similar context.
Internationalized names are currently stored in an ASCII-compatible encoding derived from the Unicode Standard. That standard, however, includes certain characters which are visually identical but may be composed in multiple ways, the choice of which is locale-specific. This creates an uncertainty in how a specific DNS label might be understood by other systems which rely on the DNS. This issue is not limited to the DNS, but also occurs in other systems where a known-item match is expected; username and password matching are examples. As originally described in the related IAB statement, this topic is currently blocking specific updates and is the program’s current priority.
To contact the list owners, use the following email address: i18n-discuss-owner@iab.org
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