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Jean-François Abramatic

Jean-François Abramatic is Chairman of W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium. Formerly Associate Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (1997-1998) and Director of Development and Industrial Relations at INRIA (1992-1999), he was responsible for establishing the European branch of W3C in partnership with MIT LCS in 1995. He was the General Chairman of the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference that was held in Paris in May 1996.

Jean-François was asked by the French government to prepare a report entitled "Le Développement Technique de l'Internet". The report was published in June 1999.

His areas of expertise include networking, image processing and graphics.

Jean-François received his Master's degree from Ecole des Mines in Nancy and his PhD from the University of Paris VI.

He was selected for the ICANN Board by the Protocol Supporting Organization. He served on the ICANN Board from October 1999 until September 2000.

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."