Supporting "IDN" is a necessary job. That's been made clear to the
Internet community. If it "complicates" things, well, then that's
what has to be done. If the Internet is to be global, it can't
restrict the world to just a few convenient languages.
Not to quibble unnecessarily, but the folks I came to the dance with at
IETF-50, eventually went home fairly disapointed after -51, and -52,with
none of their proposed mechanisms drafts having obtained even working group
draft status.
You know what the constraints are -- no zone local semantics (e.g., case
folding rules, courtesy H.A.) for a glyph repetoire that in some ranges
is also a character set, no intermediate tables, no flag day(s) for apps,
and so on.
To describe that as "IDN", rather than "a way to represent, poorly for
some, not so poorly for others, character sets other than ASCII in apps",
leaves the later reader ignorant of the baroque design choices available
and discarded on the road to RACE II.
In Abenaki, "w", "ou" and "8" all collate to the same code point, and the
representation of the code point is application specific (modern, early,
and 17thrCa styles).
Eric
P.S. 17th century French lacked a "w" character, "8" is a "u" atop an "o".
You know what the constraints are -- no zone local semantics (e.g., case
folding rules, courtesy H.A.) for a glyph repetoire that in some ranges
is also a character set, no intermediate tables, no flag day(s) for
apps,
and so on.
It's sad that one of the constraints isn't for this to
be explained in plain English. Sometimes I think people
take jargon too far. Yes, we do need some special vocabulary
to talk about detailed technical things, but every time we
invent new vocabulary, we compartmentalize knowledge into
stovepipes and we prevent cross-fertilization with other
fields of knowledge.
P.S. 17th century French lacked a "w" character, "8" is a "u" atop an
"o".
And people who write Russian in mobile phone SMS
will often write things like
4to ti xo4esh videt?
Where the "4" represents "ch" and the two
occurences of "i" represent two separate
cyrillic letters.
Russia is an interesting country with respect to
domain names. Sometimes you will see a domain name
written in cyrillic characters that are intended to
be transliterated one-by-one into latin characters.
This is signified by using cyrillic for the .ru ending.
And sometimes you see a cyrillic domain name with
a russian word which is intended to be translated
into the english word to form the domain name.
--Michael Dillon
And people who write Russian in mobile phone SMS
will often write things like
4to ti xo4esh videt?
It would be written "chto ti hochesh videti" or "chto ti xochesh
videti". Russian transliterations are rather easy to follow since they are
phonetic. We are not counting 3l33t speakers.
Russia is an interesting country with respect to
domain names. Sometimes you will see a domain name
written in cyrillic characters that are intended to
be transliterated one-by-one into latin characters.
This is signified by using cyrillic for the .ru ending.
And sometimes you see a cyrillic domain name with
a russian word which is intended to be translated
into the english word to form the domain name.
When Russian is written using English letters, it is phonetic. The native
speakers understand it. The non-native speakers look at it the same way as
they view domain names that do not contain recognizable words.
Alex
Even in your own example you used "x" in place of "h" - this is not phonetic but literal representation of russian letter "x". So while it
is for the most part phonetic, it really depends on who is writing
and I've yet to see two people use exactly the same transliteration of russian in latin letters; as an example I would write above as
"chto ty hochesh videt'".
Oh, and did I mention that written cyrillic russian difers from spoken language and as it regularly has ambigous soft/hard sounds transliterated only as hard. When transliterating to latin many do it from spoken language
sounds, so don't be surprised to see "shto ty hochesh videt'" (which might
turn into "wto ty hochew videt" for those few who represent "sh" as "w"
because letters are visually similar eventhough sounds are not) and then
others do it the other way around making everything hard and even getting
rid of yat' derived letters - "chto ti hochesh videt".