Comments on: Guardian article on IDNs. Wait for the complaints… http://kierenmccarthy.com/2006/11/24/guardian-article-on-idns-wait-for-the-complaints/ News and views on domain names, the Internet and life in general Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:05:23 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: IDN Investor http://kierenmccarthy.com/2006/11/24/guardian-article-on-idns-wait-for-the-complaints/comment-page-1/#comment-5212 IDN Investor Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:33:12 +0000 http://kierenmccarthy.co.uk/2006/11/24/guardian-article-on-idns-wait-for-the-complaints/#comment-5212 You are right to cover this complex issue. What does more of a disservice, however, is John Klensin's off the wall comments about £.com's supposedly sneaking through, when it is the very standards he helped design that have enabled such domains to be registered, sold and resold, and now be put to use. John Klensin has a set of strange ideas about what should constitute a domain, which he has written into the IDN standard. That is, a domain should be from a natural language, and it should not be unambiguous. Well guess what? A £.com in fact less ambiguous that pound.com. A man as smart as Klensin should know better than to bend the truth to fit the facts. And the facts read out: his interpretation of what constitutes a good domain, ie. coming from a natural language, and being unambiguous is a bad definition of a good domain, and is full of Western bias against symbols, so widely used, right along side ordinary characters, in so many non-Western languages, and in the case of £, in English itself. You are right to cover this complex issue. What does more of a disservice, however, is John Klensin’s off the wall comments about £.com’s supposedly sneaking through, when it is the very standards he helped design that have enabled such domains to be registered, sold and resold, and now be put to use.

John Klensin has a set of strange ideas about what should constitute a domain, which he has written into the IDN standard. That is, a domain should be from a natural language, and it should not be unambiguous. Well guess what? A £.com in fact less ambiguous that pound.com. A man as smart as Klensin should know better than to bend the truth to fit the facts.

And the facts read out: his interpretation of what constitutes a good domain, ie. coming from a natural language, and being unambiguous is a bad definition of a good domain, and is full of Western bias against symbols, so widely used, right along side ordinary characters, in so many non-Western languages, and in the case of £, in English itself.

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