Thank you. I was hoping someone would point out the support for parallel
operation so we could go further down that path. As you note, it seems to
be the closest to providing local/global support already.
That means postal gives us:
1. Global support for a common "character set"
2. Global support for a carefully mixed character set -- though really it
is just a partitioning between the global field and the local field
3. Local support for a local character set.
(the support goes beyond character set, but let's leave it at that if
that's ok.)
An immediate problem with comparing to postal is that it somewhat
correlates with the path a letter will take, so that the incremental
interpretation can be done by groups with different language
skill-sets. The DNS does not have that flexibility and the domain name
interpretation is not part of the transfer sequence of the data.
Schemes that put an ACE-like field into a .com might be considered to be
like #2, above, by really they are not. The whole string is still global.
Frankly this leaves me viewing the postal example as pretty unhelpful for
finding a solution to the DNS requirement.
On the other hand, this thread was triggered by Graham's question about the
negative impact of partitioning. The postal example would seem to show
that the effect is not so bad.
Except I would claim that it is not partitioning. Note that an address
always has a global representation, in addition to a possibly different
local one.
Perhaps that can reconciled as easily as claiming that any 'local' domain
name must also have a global form? (But, somehow, the word "scaling" gets
in the way of believing that.)
d/
At 05:20 PM 12/4/00 +0900, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
At 00/12/03 13:57 -0500, Dave Crocker wrote:
Would it be such a bad thing to be unable to postal mail a letter or
package to anywhere in the world?
Of course it would be very bad. But it is usual now to send mail
e.g. from Japan to Japan with an address without any Latin letters.
It is also possible to send mail e.g. from the US or Europe to e.g.
Japan, with all but the country name in ideographs.
So the postal system is already now much closer to multilingual
domain names than to ASCII-only domain names.
It is also possible, as far as I understand, to send mail
with an address only written in Latin letters, to any country
in the world. The multilingual domain name solution should of
course provide a way (at least one way) to do this.
=-=-=-=-=
Dave Crocker <dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg Consulting <www.brandenburg.com>
Tel: +1.408.246.8253, Fax: +1.408.273.6464