Standardization of Multilingualizing Rifaah Ekrema Domain Names( MLDN) Mohamed A. Elhamalaway [Target Category: Standards Track] Omar Bakleh Khaled Alahmad Fidaa Al-Jundi Expire: 8-April-2005 Mhd. Elfatih Altijani "By submitting this Internet-Draft, I certify that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which I am aware have been disclosed, orwill be disclosed, and any of which I become aware will be disclosed,in accordance with RFC 3668." Standardization of Multilingualizing Domain Names( MLDN) Status of this Memo: This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 except that the right to produce derivative works is not granted. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or to be made obsolete by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress. The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at: http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at: http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Copyright Notice: Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved. Abstract: Until now, many standards was issued to standardize creating and managing IDN (Internationalized Domain Names), all those standards discussed the technical problem issued from the need to keep the structure of the internet that uses standard (ASCII) domain names untouched; using this pretext those standards forced some rules that make lingual grammars for some languages not respected on the language domain names. This document will try to define a new type of domain names called the "multilingual domain names" (MLDNs) , these names are supposed to respect the grammatical and spelling of every language so at least, every language can use the words of its own dictionary in its own domain names. The system supposed to manage the reservation and the resolution of the new domain names (MLDNs) must also respect the infrastructure of the traditional domain names system (DNS) untouched so it will not jeopardize the stability of the internet. In the rest of the document we will refer to that system by MLDNS (Multi- Lingual Domain Names System). MLDNS Will use the same large repertoire of Unicode characters to compose its domain names and that means the use of none-ASCII characters, this use must allow all languages to have their domain names that respect their language properties and rules. Also it must depends on a technique that keeps the stable DNS system untouched. Comments on this document can be sent to the authors at: arabic-idn-admin@aietf.org. Table of content: 1.Introduction 2.Problem Analysis 3.Introducing MLDN 4.ML Recommendations 5.MLDNA 6.Full Copyright Statement: 7.References 8.Terms 9.Authors 1. Introduction: Internationalized domain names (IDN) are still a subject of a great debates between technical associations and organizations, each one tries to create new standards that controls the new addressing mass that will be launched by the new unlimited possibilities of non ASCII domain names, all those standards agree on one major issue that is keeping the current stable DNS system unaffected by the new era of using UNICODE domain names. Focusing on technical issues in all drafts and RFCs talking about IDN imposed a lot of natural language usage limitations, and these limitations prevent national languages from using all their characters and all their vocabulary and their sentences structure in their national domain names. And in some times those limitations force the user to use domain names that does not satisfy the grammars of the natural language. For example, the prevention of using space character in domain names will force languages that contain joint characters (characters that change their shapes according to their place in the word) to have un- readable domain names, the suggested solution is to use dashes to separate between words consists of joinable characters and this is not acceptable grammatically. like Chinese and Arabic languages as RFC 3743 and internet draft "draft-bakleh-reg-adm-acg-apu-00.txt". 2. Problem Analysis: The problem mentioned in the introduction is caused by the fact that IDN rule makers have prepared general studies to control the creation of IDNs, such studies does not take in consideration the properties and the specialties of each language and as a result we have Internationalized domain name that does not satisfy the user needs of having user friendly domain names which are familiar to his own national language which is called multilingual domain name MLDN. This can be clearly seen by the fact that we have a UNIQUE nameprep proposed to test all the domain names in the world in all the languages of the world nations, and this nameprep is recommended to be the first layer to handle the domain name and decide wither it can be used as an IDN or not. which isnÆt a technical need to keep the current DNS stability and the network infrastructure untouched. 3. Introducing MLDN: The term MLDN stands for MultiLingual Domain Names, the only difference between IDN and MLDN is that MLDN allows each language to implement its own nameprep to test its own domain names, and it allows each language to put syntactical rules of composing its own domain names. And so it will be the sole responsible of determining its domain names method and nameprep method managing its reservation and registration systems, but it is NOT allowed to each language to have its own ACE (ACII Compatible Encoding) to represent its domain names. 4. ML Recommendations: MLDN must have several namepreps but a unique ACE to encode the national domain name. based on these MLDNs recommendations: 1.MLDNA must not use more than one lingual character set in any part of MLDNs. 2.The lingual nameprep must gives the possibility to use all languageÆs words in the domain name system from both technical and grammatical point of view. 3.MLDNA reservation must have the technical possibility to register any domain name agreed by its nameprep method. 4.MLDN must give each nation a full control to determine its lingual nameprep and its elements (the UNICODE characters set and its (MLgTLDs) Multilingual generic Top Level domain names and its (MLccTLDs) Multilingual country code Top Level Domain Names) to be the UNIQUE choice to use in its domain names. The nation's control must be submitting by the accreditation of its official countries through its ccTLDs authorities as the sole publisher through ICANN and IANA. 5.MLDN must create an smart ACE based on variant characters encoding according its using rates to have longer MLDNs more than the PUNYCODE gives. 5. MLDNA: To realize this goal we have to take the previous RFCs talking about IDN (Internationalized domain names) in consideration, specially RFC 3490 talking about IDNA (Internationalized Domain Names in Application) this RFC offers a reasonable solution to realize non ASCII domain names system based on the current DNS system. IDNA suggests that the following structure to realize IDN system. +------+ | User | +------+ ^ | Input and display: local interface methods | (pen, keyboard, glowing phosphorus, ...) +-------------------|-------------------------------+ | v | | +-----------------------------+ | | | Application | | | | (ToASCII and ToUnicode | | | | operations may be | | | | called here) | | | +-----------------------------+ | | ^ ^ | End system | | | | | Call to resolver: | | Application-specific | | ACE | | protocol: | | v | ACE unless the | | +----------+ | protocol is updated | | | Resolver | | to handle other | | +----------+ | encodings | | ^ | | +-----------------|----------|----------------------+ DNS protocol: | | ACE | | v v +-------------+ +---------------------+ | DNS servers | | Application servers | +-------------+ +---------------------+ This structure gives the possibility to realize what we have already called MLDN, according to this RFC each IDN system will have its toASCII function or layer that grantees the conversion of UNICODE domain names into standard domain name. the main obstacle in IDNA that prevents the realization of MLDN is the existence of the UNIQUE nameprep in the toASCII layer. So the idea of MLDNA is to use the IDNA structure but to let each language build its own nameprep and us it in the toASCII layer. Allowing the national language users to build its nameprep will permit them to put linguistic rules to control the creation of the languages national domain names according to its grammatical and orthographical rules. And this will guarantee the creation of user friendly MLDNs with the full respect to both internet current infrastructure and national languages needs. 6. Full Copyright Statement: Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78 and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights. THIS DOCUMENT AND THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN ARE PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS AND THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. DISCLAIMER THIS DOCUMENT AND THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS AND THE AUTHORS, THE ORGANIZATION THEY REPRESENT OR ARE SPONSORED BY, THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 7. References: [RFC3492] Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)A. Costello Univ. of California, Berkeley Category: Standards Track, March 2003 [RFC3491]: Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) P. Hoffman, IMC & VPNC M. Blanchet, Viagenie Category: Standards Track, March 2003. [RFC3490]: Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) P. Faltstrom, Cisco, Category: Standards Track P. Hoffman, IMC & VPNC, A. Costello, UC Berkeley, March 2003. [RFC3743]: Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. 8. Terms: MLDN: Multi Lingual Domain Name. IDN: Internationalized Domain Name. IDNA: Internationalized Domain Name in Application. (RFC 3490) Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names; draft- ietf-idn-nameprep, Feb 2002, Paul Hoffman, Marc Blanchet, work in progress. Punycode: An encoding of Unicode for use with IDNA, draft-ietf-idn-punycode, Feb 2002, Adam M. Costello, work in progress. 9. Authors: Rifaah Ekrema: AIETF Organization P.O: 30775 Damascus, Syria. Phone: +963 93 611087 Fax: +963 11 2238490 rifaah@aietf.org Omar Bakleh: Damascus University, Damascus, Syria Phone: +963 93 363004 Fax: +963 11 2139804 Omar@damasuniv.shern.net Mohamed A. Elhamalaway: Al-Azhar University, Systems & Computers Engineering dept. Cairo, Egypt. Phone: +20 6321465 Fax: +20 6377446 mhamalwy@yahoo.com Fidaa Al-Jundi: Nozum Alhausabah Company, Dubai, UAE. Phone: +971 50 6507282 fida@hausabah.com Khaled Alahmad: High Institute of Applicable Science & technology, Damascus, Syria Phone: +963 93 330345 ka@ka-it.net Mhd. Elfatih Altijani: Technical Manager, Sudatel, Alkhartoum, Sudan. Phone: +249 12 390573 elfatih@sudatel.net