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Public Comment - July 2009 archive

Board Review – Second Review Working Group Report

(ended 5 July 09)
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Travel Support Guidelines for Community Members

(ended 6 July 09)
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Proposals for Systematization of Organizational Review Processes

(ended 8 July 09)
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City TLD Constituency Petition and Charter

(ended 10 July 09)
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One & Two-Character Names in dot-travel

(ended 10 July 09)
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Fast Track Implementation (3rd Revision)

(ended 15 July 09)
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.PRO Fee Amendment

(ended 17 July 09)
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Applicant Guidebook Analysis and Excerpts

(ended 20 July 09)
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New gTLDs – Final Reports on Competition and Pricing

(ended 20 July 09)
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GNSO Stakeholder Group Charters

(ended 21 July 09 Extended to 23 July 09)
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Bylaw Amendments Related to GNSO Restructuring

(ended 29 July 09)
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Root Server System Scaling Study

(ended 31 July 09)
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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."