John;
(Can we please move this discussion to the IDN list, where it
belongs?)
The point is that IDN WG is purposeless and is wrong to exist. Of
course, it is waste of time to discuss it in IDN list. So, the
only reasonable reaction is to ignore it (I dropped improper CC:).
The only necessary discussion on domain names, IF ANY, is
localization issues, for which there is no specific WG of IETF.
(iii) Regardless of how the names in the DNS are coded, it is
important to have analogies to "two sided business cards".
A typical business card of Japanese have Chinese characters.
When we internatinalize it, we use the other side to put a Lain
character version.
As we already have fully internatinalized DNS with Latin
characters, Chinese characters in DNS is localization against
internationalization.
And, because of the
registration issue, there is no plausible way to impose a
requirement that every host (or other DNS entry) have a name in
ASCII if it has a name in some other script: people and hosts
not visible outside their own countries may not care enough to
go to the trouble.
That are local issues.
If people want local names let them have them under local domains,
with all the local conventions on encoding and everything.
The administrator of the local domains may or may not force people
have additional internatinalized domain names.
Note that local, here, means culturally (not necessarily geographically)
local that ccTLDs may or maynot be the local domains.
But, it can be said that gTLDs are not a proper place to put local
names.
Masataka Ohta