Skip to main content
Resources

Message from Mao Wei to Paul Twomey

Via Email

Subject: A letter of Support for IDN Guidelines from CNNIC
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 16:47:49 +0800
From: "Mao Wei"
To: Paul Twomey
CC: "'Louis Touton'" , "Hualin Qian"

18 June 2003

To ICANN:

At its Rio de Janeiro meeting, the ICANN Board authorized the President of ICANN to seek to promote consensus among leading IDN registries on a set of consensus Guidelines for Implementation of IDNs under discussion by the leading IDN registries. CNNIC has participated in the drafting of these consensus Guidelines. We support these Guidelines and are pleased to commit to adhere to them in our implementation of IDNs. Recognizing that the Internet community will gain experience with IDN registation policies and procedures as the deployment of IDN services proceeds, we also commit to cooperate with our peer registries and ICANN in good faith to review the Guidelines at regular intervals over the coming years.

Best regards,

Mao Wei
Director General
China Internet Network Information Center(CNNIC)

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."