According to the article from Reuters (via Internet Policy), Khaled Fattal of MINC is asking 6M USD to solve the Arabic Domain Names.

WTF!? 6M USD to do Arabic Domain Names¹? I suppose CJK has 1000x more characters then Arabic, we probably should ask 6B USD to produce RFC 3743. Okay, maybe it is not fair to compare by absolute character count so lets just say 50x. I will settle for 300M USD okay? :-)

I was one of founding member of MINC. The original vision is to have an organization that can help faciliate and resolve the language issues with IDN that will not be tackled by the IETF IDN-WG. But after been hijacked by certain commerical interests, and then hijack again and again, I stayed away from them as far as I can.
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CircleID asked me to write an article on our recently published RFC 3743. Check it out and let me know what you think (apart from the grammer mistakes which I keep finding everytime i read it again :-)

It is difficult to explain RFC 3743 or commonly known as the Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines without some lesson on Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), particularly how it relates to Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). Luckily, an Internet-Draft [PDF] we wrote back in 2001 discusses the issues quite neatly in this context.

In brief, Chinese characters (Hanzi) or Han ideographs are evolved from pictographs (writing made up of pictures) across thousands of years. Unlike other writing systems, Han Ideographs are constantly evolving. In the 1950s, China underwent a major exercise to simplify the Chinese writing using an almost systematic process. The resulting simplified form or Simplified Chinese is now being used in China and Singapore while the original form or Traditional Chinese is still being used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and most oversea Chinese communities.

Because of the almost systematic simplification process, there is a somewhat 1-to-1 matching between Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. It is easy to associate it to the like of uppercase/lowercase in English but at best, it is a bad analogy that grossly underestimates the depth of the problem.

If that is not complicated enough, Han Ideographs are also used to write Japanese (Kanji), Korean (Hanja) and old Vietnamese (Chu Han and Chu Nom), and each language has its own simplification history and rule. In addition, there are many Han Ideographs that look exactly the same (CJK Compatibility) or have similar looks (zVariants) but assigned different code points in Unicode.

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I feel so proud :-)

I am flying tonight to Dubai to give a presentation on IDN at the RIPE-NCC meeting (the European Regional Internet Registries). I will be talking abit on IDN-OSS, hopefully getting more support for the project. :-) You can find my presentation here.

This is my first trip to Dubai. Heard a lot of good stuff about it and look forward to going there. (It helps when they offers to pay for the trip too. Thanks!). Will blog as much as I can :-)

After a long delay, I finally got some time this weekend to start doing some work on IDN Open Source Software. It is an idea that was floated around at ICANN Montreal meeting and I spend a couple of weeks putting a proposal together.

..to develop quality RFC-compliant software to support IDN capabilities in different applications (web browsers, email and instant messaging clients, etc) running on all major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Unix etc).

Internet Software Consortium (of BIND, INND fame) has kindly host the project. We also have a Advisory Council.

We need volunteers and donations! :-)

Patrik Fältström send me an email from his new and proud domain fältström.se. Notice there is the swedish character ä and ö? Yep, Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) finally! Yippee!

IDN is the effort of the WG I co-chair (together with Marc Blanchet) from 1999 to 2002 to bring internationalization to domain names, initiated from a project I did back in 1998. You know, if I know what I have to go through to do this, I probably won’t do it in the first place but now it is done, I am really glad I did.

ps: For more info on IDN, see RFC 3454, 3490, 3491 and 3492.