[idn] Thoughts on nameprep

[Bruce Thomson]

Hi, pardon my late appearance on the list. I have read all about nameprep, and cannot understand why we need it at all. I have lived in Japan for 23 years, and wrote what I believe was the first Japanese-language word processor for a laptop computer in 1986. I presently receive about 80 e-mails in Japanese per day, and send perhaps 10. In the case of Japanese, there are legacy character encodings that date back from before we had graphics on personal computers, that is, each character code was written into a byte in VRAM, and was translated by the hardware into the corresponding graphic. With the introduction of Japanese support, naturally we had two-byte characters and single-byte characters mixed, and the two-byte ones were twice the width on the screen as well. Naturally, we now have full graphics, and there is no particular relationship between a character's width in memory and on the screen, as we have proportional fonts, and settable font sizes, etc. Nonetheless, the Japanese computer user is saddled with ancient useless encodings that make input error-prone. Nameprep would of course make domain-name input more user friendly, especially for raw beginners. My point is, though, that this problem is not unique to domain names, and solving it only for domain names does not seem to be useful. If a novice user doesn't immediately learn that certain characters such as full-width numbers and half-width kana have been deprecated, he will be completely unable to use most popular applications. He won't be able to enter his address or credit card number; he won't be able to enter user names or passwords. So my question is, why is the idn WG involved in this issue? This should be the purview of the keyboard people. The justification I have heard is that people not proficient in the particular language will not be able to pick up a (Japanese) business card and reliably type in the domain name, because many characters look alike to him. Well, I feel that such people should not be using Japanese domain names. The whole reason for idns is for non-English-speaking people to not be forced to use English. There is no need to force English speakers to use idns. The domain should just have another Romanized domain name. When I send an e-mail to a Japanese, I might append a signature file with my return address, snail mail address, name, etc., and these will all be in Japanese. When I send overseas, I will of course use a different signature file. And I can just define an extra account under Outlook that will let me choose which signature file to use, and have a different return address as well. I would never send anything overseas with an idn return address, just as I would not write the text in Japanese. It's enough that Japanese domains should work well in Japan, and that will happen without nameprep. I am not as familiar with the situation in other languages, but I think the same logic would apply. Our problem here seems to be that the interested parties (i.e., the non-English speakers) are not well represented on this list. So I urge people in other countries with experience similar to mine to please speak up on this. Nameprep can and probably will be implemented at the application level. Microsoft already prepends www. and appends .com if I leave them off. They can handle this kind of thing. But what is the pressure to put it in the spec? Bruce