Skip to main content
Resources

Daniel Dardailler

Until the end of 2018, Daniel Dardailler was W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Associate Chair for Europe, manager of the W3C/ERCIM European and African operations and chair of the official standard liaison task force of the consortium.

Daniel joined the W3C/INRIA team in Sophia-Antipolis, France, in July 1996. In 1997, he launched the Web Accessibility Initiative and was the technical director of the activity until 2003. In this role, he participated in the design of some important standards like HTML, CSS, and WAI Guidelines.

As the proposer and manager of several large European Commission IST funded projects supporting the activities of W3C in Europe, Daniel has over the past few years led W3C liaison activities in the area of European and international normalisation, ICANN W3C liaison, UN/WSIS participation, and ISO/ITU liaison matters.

Prior to joining W3C, from 1990 to 1996 Daniel worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, as a software designer and programmer for the X Window System Consortium and the OSF/TheOpenGroup. From 1986 to 1990, he was a Unix/Graphics engineer at the Bull Research Center in France.

Daniel holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science in Digital Typography and Networking from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (1989).

Daniel Dardailler was appointed liaison to the ICANN Board by the W3C on behalf of the Technology Liaison Group to serve during the year 2006. Board liaison terms end after the conclusion of the ICANN annual meeting each year.

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."