grrp-reqs-06, 9. Internationalization Considerations

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

  [1] Current Internet standards restrict the encoding of Internet host
  and domain names to a subset of the 7-bit US-ASCII character set.

Lets be specific, rfc1035, and 0x2d,0x30-0x39,0x41-0x5a,0x6a-0x7a.
                                -      0-9       A-Z       a-z
We may as well mention ASCII case folding, 1035 has a reasonable Note
at the end of 2.3.1 Preferred name syntax.

  Registries and registrars now serve customers whose native languages
  require encodings other than US-ASCII, which automatically disallows  
  use of those languages when registering host and domain names.

Awkward language, what is it that "which" refers to? The "US-ASCII"
restricition, first sentence. If the subordinate clause is phrased
as a sentence ... 

  Support for internationalized host and domain names will greatly
  increase world-wide usability of a generic registry registrar
  protocol, so standards for exchanging internationalized information
  MUST be considered during the protocol design process.

Apple pie, but we don't actually state (or cite) what "internationalized"
means, yet, and the jump from "host and domain names" (technical data) to
social data (a subset of) "internationalized information" is left as an
exercise to the reader.

We could state:

	a. The protocol will support any encoding of technical and/or
	   social data, (code-set independent, or csi)
or
	b. The protocol will support some encodings (list) of technical
	   data, and some, possibly different, encodings (list) of social
	   data, (code-set dependent, or csd)
or
	c. The protocol will not support some encodings (list) of
	   technical data, and will not support some, possibly different,
	   encodings (list) of social data,

From Deng Xiang's response we know that UTF8 encodings of technical data
is a requirement of a provreg protocol deployed by the .CN ccTLD Registry
and Registrars.

It is possible that the range of encodings for social data includes GBK
and Big5 as well as UTF8.
  
  [2] The protocol MUST allow exchange of meta-data associated with
  objects in formats consistent with current internationalized character
  encoding and language representation standards.

I honestly don't know what this means. If it means code-set identifiers
or locale identifiers or something else, we should be more specific (and
useful) about "metadata". Every time I hear that word I reach for my RDF.

  [3] All date and time values specified in a generic registry-registrar
  protocol MUST be expressed in Universal Coordinated Time.  Dates and  
  times MUST include information to represent a four-digit calendar
  year, a calendar month, a calendar day, hours, minutes, seconds,
  fractional seconds, and the time zone for Universal Coordinated Time.
  
I suggest we cite iso8601 and pick a specific format, b (UCT, above).

I do see a problem however with any "user and/or accounting package friendly"
temporal identifier (and we do use time, Scott is going to add a temporal
identifer sufficient to support ordering in addition to what is in -06 at
the moment). The problem is that objects have temporal properties, and these
properties are passed around as operands and as identifiers in a common
representation (good) but with no common synchronization mechanism (bad).

Anyone for NTP (not for sorting out nano-payments) as a specific requirement
for temporal consistency? How about putting an upper bound on clock deltas
between provreg entities? I claim it is Feb. 14, 1901. Another possibility
is seperating "meta- or technical time" from "social time". The first provreg
uses, NTP-esque, the second is in provreg messages.

Cheers,
Eric
P.S. Sent only to provreg, though nominal overlap with idn & whois.

References (add cite)
   [ISO8601] "Data elements and interchange formats -- Information
     interchange -- Representation of dates and times", 1988.
or/and
  [RFC2030] "Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) Version 4 for IPv4,
     IPv6 and OSI. D. Mills. October 1996.
and
  [insert one or more lists of encoding standards here]