On 11/24/10 5:50 AM, Patrik Fältström wrote:
On 24 nov 2010, at 02.26, Doug Barton wrote:

no _technical_ reason that TLD labels should be all-alphabetic


FWIW, when you display internationalized domain names, and mixed RTL and LTR contexts 
(overall, in a label etc), you can get "interesting" results when characters 
that have not directionality (like numbers) are displayed adjacent to punctuation.

digits in the U0030..U0039 (latin script digits), U0660..U669 (arabic script arabic-indic digits) and U06F0..U06F9 (arabic script eastern arabic-indic digits) have directionality properties. i know this was a casual error and paf is caffine-free slovenia at the moment.

See http://stupid.domain.name/node/681 for an example.

the example shows that the bidi algorithm used, correctly, if the sequence of encoded values is "text", incorrectly, if the sequence of encoded values is a dns label, render a directionality property of "."

restated, "." has a property which is dependent upon the directionality of the proximal character(s), according to the authors of the idn bidi algorithm. this may come as a surprise to applications that assume that "." is a separator, semantically unaffected by the properties of adjacent character(s).

the net of the unicadette usage advice to the dns weenies is don't put digits in identifiers, um, don't put digits in identifiers composed from characters with a rtl directionality property, um, don't mix scripts with differing directionality properties, at least, not in sight of dots or children, not because these are not "proper words" in (some language), the point of view advanced by an important, but mistaken on this point, group of arabic script and arabic language (but not arabic script and farsi/urdu/... language) users, but because Ox2E in US-ASCII, a standard published in 1963, has a property unknown to the the authors of that sequence of standards.

one could summarize the unicadette's point of view that the choice of "." as a label separator was an error in 952 and that ken, mary and jake blew it, but the real blame should go to jon who blew it in 921 (required reading for the no-digits advacates). we're all lucky that 820's use of 0x2E has not yet been discovered by the unicadettes.

-e

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