Eric, I believe these issues are resolved. For example we can simply input دبي.امارات and عمان.الاردن (equivalent to dubai.emirates and amman.jordan) as we would in English, ie starting with city name then ccTLD, and get to the right page without concern for dot or LtoR or RtoL input. The browser is smart enough to figure the syntax and text direction by itself; I tried this on both Win 7 Explorer and iOS 6 Safari.
So the issue is back to why is there no widespread use; all IDN Arabic websites I have run across are run by government. Regards, -Ahmed -----Original Message----- From: Eric (Maule) Brunner-Williams Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2013 10:37 PM To: Ahmed Abu-Abed Cc: Tom Paseka ; menog@menog. net ; Eric (Maule) Brunner-Williams Subject: Re: [menog] New Arabic TLD and idea's popularity Ahmed points out the lack of right-to-left name spaces until recently, there being only four initially (comming out of the ICANN IDN Testbed). For those that don't follow this -- the Unicode BiDi algorithm treats punctuation -- that is -- the dots we use to separate labels within a FQDN -- as having directionality. This leads to amusing outcomes when using a RtL script for a label and a LtR script for an adjacent label. There are _issues_ with IDN uptake -- most of the Arab League namespaces have policy restrictions -- not necessarily a bad thing in abstract but in practice ... which is difficult to reconcile with a gTLD (I know, I wrote a policy proposal in response to the League of Arab States' RFP(s) for a gTLD application). Each also must decide what to do about Arabic Chat Script (Arabic on restricted Latin keyboard devices, e.g., handsets), which is a LtR script, and Latin (again, LtR), and what to do about the accessibility (to regional hosting operators and end users) of localized versions of the CMS packages and skins, and so on and on. Eric _______________________________________________ Menog mailing list [email protected] http://lists.menog.org/mailman/listinfo/menog
