The DNS issue

Some main problems that surface when using non-latin letters are :
  • some characters look the same but have different meaning
  • some languages have optional characters (hebrew) and are they meaningfull for dns ?
  • some scripts see accented letters as one some see it as composition of 2 elements
  • capitalisation

  • problem with encodings (support, conversion)
  • resolving the address must work in 2 ways : www.foo.cn and cn.foo.wwww
  • some punctuation symbols have local alternatives : "." in an IME is often represented as a "。" so should there be support for both or only one of them ?
  • should traditional input be converted to simplified input ? or should it be 2 different domains. but what with simplified characters that represent several traditional characters

The problems are not only specific to DNS-servers. All other machines and programs that have anything to do with name resolving are affected. So Web-servers and proxy-servers have to be compatible. Also firewalls and browsers have to be able to handle everything correctly. Also problems can occur for the webbrowsers. See Q269677 for Internet Explorer (this problem is solved already).

TLD for Asian Countries :
Country 
China.cn
Taiwan.tw
Hong Kong.hk
Singapore.sg

Links
CDNC : Chinese Domain Name Consortium
TWNIC : Taiwan Network Information Center
CNNIC : China Internet Network Information Center
MINC : Multilingual Internet Names Consortium.
cDNS / mDNS
i-d-n : Internationalized Domain Names IETF Working Group
Internationalized Domain Names Coming Soon (Slashdot)
i-dns

References
RFC 1034 : Domain names - concepts and facilities
RFC 1035 : Domain names - implementation and specification
RFC 2181 : Clarifications tot the DNS Specification

   
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