On Sun, 26 Nov 2006, Kim Davies wrote:

> Quoting Bennett Oprysa on Sunday November 26, 2006:
> | > Is auDA forcing registrars to implement IDN registrations?
> |
> | basically, yes.
> |
> | Registrars have been informed that the registry is being modified to handle
> | IDNs. We don't have to offer this functionality, but if another registrar
> | does, and they create a domain with IDN hostnames and that domain is then
> | transferred by the registrant to us, our system will not be able to
> | correctly handle that domain.

> How is that different from if someone presents an IDN label in a 
> hostname today? It is not like IDNs can't be supplied as hostnames right 
> now. The hostname non-compliant software will see will look like plain 
> ASCII.

Because part of supporting IDNs will be supporting the policy preventing
visually similar names being registered. So even though the hostname does 
have a plain ASCII representation, the registrar will have to perform 
additional checks. See 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html for 
links to the IDN policies of other registrars.

I do have to wonder where the demand for IDN is coming from, as English is 
by far the dominant language both online and offline and has no need for 
extra characters beyond ASCII. And while domains such as stgeorge`.com.au 
(pretend that's a grave on the e) will probably fall foul of the 
prohibition on misspellings policy, is there any reason to allow them in 
the first place? Most of the policies above only allow specific characters 
related to the language(s) spoken in the TLD's country. Of the others, 
.info allows 9 scripts, .museum any script, but only one per domain and 
with manual checking for homographs, .io a range of European scripts.

Has auDA proposed a list of what characters/scripts will be allowed in .au?

James Andrewartha