By Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World Fusion, 12/12/01
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - The Internet's main standards-setting body is putting the final touches on a set of specifications that will support foreign-language domain names instead of today's English language derivatives.
Called Internationalized Domain
Name (IDN), the new specifications are eagerly awaited by domain name registries
and registrars, which anticipate a huge market opportunity in Europe and Asia.
Once these names are operational, multinational corporations can create native-language
Web sites for marketing their products in each of the countries where they do
business.
The Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF) has been working on the controversial IDN specifications for two years,
and completing them is one of the organization's top priorities.
The IETF's IDN Working Group held
a meeting here this week to finish its scheme for converting foreign-language
characters into US ASCII equivalents for transmission over the Internet's Domain
Name System. The working group is now ready to send three documents outlining
the technical details of their approach to the full IETF and the IETF leadership
for final approval. A proposed standard could be released as early as March,
IETF participants say.
"Our basic architecture is done.
We just have to forward the documents for final approval," says Marc Blanchet,
co-chair of the working group and an IT consultant with Canadian firm Viagenie.
"We've really been under a great deal of scrutiny and review [by the IETF leadership],
so my guess is that there will be no problems.
Harald Alvestrand, chair of the
IETF and an engineer with Cisco Systems, admits that the IETF's IDN approach
won't solve the browsing problems of all Internet users around the world, but
he says it is technically sound.
"It's not what people started out
looking for, which is a painless solution that works for everyone," Alvestrand
says. "This solution will irritate a lot of people a lot of the time...[because]
it won't be transparent. People will have to have special software or they'll
see cryptic strings in their browsers. But I don't think it will do any active
harm to the Internet."
Once it is released as a proposed
standard, the IDN technology is expected to have an immediate impact on the
domain name industry because it can be used for foreign-language top-level domains
as well as domain names.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers [ICANN], which oversees the domain name system, has been holding
off most registries and registrars from offering foreign-language domain names
until the IETF develops a standardized approach.
VeriSign Global Registry Services,
which operates the dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domains, has been offering foreign-language
domain names for a year using software plug-ins and keywords to resolve the
names. But VeriSign has promised to migrate one million foreign-language names
it has sold to the IETF's IDN standard when it is released.
"There are 20-odd registries that
are operational in VeriSign's IDN testbed. They have the transition mechanisms
in place, so they can move [to the IETF's IDN standard] pretty quickly," says
Rick Wesson, an IETF participant who develops software for domain name registries
and registrars with Alice's Registry.
What needs to happen next is for
application software developers to incorporate the IDN specifications in Web
browsers, e-mail clients and network administration software. Microsoft, for
example, has said it will support the IETF's IDN standard in its Internet Explorer.
Despite its promise, the IETF's
IDN technology will leave some Internet users unsatisfied. For example, it doesn't
help Chinese Internet users cope with the translation between traditional and
simplified character sets in their language. Nor does it address Chinese, Korean
and Japanese characters that look the same but have different meanings.
These Asian language problems stem
from Unicode, a computer industry standard for representing language characters
that was developed with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The IETF's IDN technology uses Unicode.
"The Chinese have a real problem,
but because the root of their problem is ISO and Unicode actions taken 10 years
ago, the IETF can't fix their problem without breaking Unicode," says Paul Hoffman,
one of the authors of the IETF's IDN approach.
At the same time the IETF is wrapping
up work on IDN, it is considering launching an effort to create a new search
service on top of the Internet's domain name system that could fix the Asian
language problems among other domain name issues.
The Internet Resource Name Search
Service (IRNSS) would provide context and location matching to help end users
find the right Web sites. It also would allow more than one company to own a
particular domain name, such as Delta.com, by asking users if they are interested
in airline tickets or faucets.
"IRNSS solves the IDN problems,
solves the whole problem with domain names and makes trademark lawyers happy,"
says Michael Mealling, a proponent of IRNSS and an engineer with VeriSign. Mealling
says the IRNSS development effort would take about a year.
Regardless of where they stand on
the IRNSS and IDN approaches, most IETF participants anticipate a huge pent-up
demand for foreign-language domain names. Alvestrand, for example, says his
son can now have an e-mail address that reflects the true spelling of his first
name.
"I can't wait to register my company's
domain name with the accent over the e," Blanchet says. "That's been a dream
of mine for 10 years."
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