John C Klensin wrote:
>
> --On Wednesday, 06 December, 2000 10:22 -0500 Dan Kolis
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Dan K says:
> > 1) your right. with your tld .de I assume for the moment you
> > also speak German. The difference is what you 'try' when a url
> > doesn't work. If you tried:
> > > http://�rehct.de
> > > and it didn't work you would probably try:
> > > http://brehct.de
>
> Dan, I suggest that many German-speakers (and even more
> automated systems) would probably try, not the above, but
> http://ssrehct.de/
> which would, I believe, be the algorithmic rendering of the
> non-ASCII character. And, while this isn't a good example for
> a number of reasons (my memory is poor, but I don't recall ever
> seeing Eszett at the beginning of a word and am not sure it is
> possible), therein lies much of the problem because the mapping
> is not reversible unless one infers from the presence in .DE
> that German-language mapping rules must apply (a *very* risky
> assumption).
No � at the beginning of words (and the author Brecht certainly doesn't
have any �'s), but even if you know the language, the mapping is not
reversible. ss, ae, oe, ue, etc. are all legal letter pairs, as anybody
who's tried to 8859-1'ify an ASCII text has discovered to their chagrin.
Indeed, there are situations, besides names, where even a dictionary is
not good enough since both words exist (Masse and Ma�e being one common
example).
>
> john
>
> -
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--
Henning Schulzrinne http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs
