Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
| Subscribe: Newsletters & News Alerts | ICANN Blog | Public Comment
| Subscribe: Newsletters & News Alerts | ICANN Blog | Public Comment
An Important Step Toward the Implementation of IDN Top-Level Domains: New Versions of IDNA Protocol Revision Proposals Posted
26 November 2007
Revised papers of the technical standards that define the implementation of IDNs — the standards are called IDNA — were recently released via the IETF editors. These revisions are an important step toward the delegation of IDN top-level domains.
An informal expert panel, working as what the IETF calls a "design team," evaluated experiences gained in the implementation of the previous version of IDNA since its introduction in 2003, and identified several key areas of future work. These key areas were described in several documents that triggered a formal revision of the IDNA protocol. New versions of the internet-drafts proposing the revisions to the IDNA protocol have been released and are as follows:
The core components in the revision effort include:
The issues with the current IDN model that led to these revisions are discussed in RFC4690. This RFC discusses specific character issues where the same script is used in different languages, issues related to cases where languages can be expressed by using more than one script, issues involving bi-directional cases, and issues concerning the topic of visually confusing characters.
ICANN urges the Internet technical community to take part in the final stages of this development work by reviewing this documentations and constructively commenting on it. The review is moving forward in accordance with standard IETF processes. The intention is to finalize this work and publish the new IDNA standard within the next two months.