[AfrICANN-discuss] Current Difficulties With Displaying Internationalized Top-Level Domains

[Mawaki Chango]

Thanks AR for the news... could you perhaps also provide the
link for the original post, please? I'm not sure the
illustration in the text came out well as I don't seem to see
how one could distinguish right and left from the strings of
symbols and characters displayed, thanks, Mawaki. 

--- Anne-Rachel Inné <annerachel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Current Difficulties With Displaying Internationalized
> Top-Level Domains
> Oct 15, 2007 8:50 AM PST | Comments: 1
> By Kim Davies
> 
> Earlier this week, we inserted eleven new top-level domains in
> the DNS root
> zone. These represent the term "test" translated into ten
> languages, in ten
> different scripts (Chinese is represented in two different
> scripts, and
> Arabic script is used by two different languages).
> 
> This blog post is not about that. (If you're interested about
> it, read our
> report on the delegations.)
> 
> What I would like to talk about is some of the difficulties we
> face today in
> expressing scripts in a consistent way over the Internet. The
> fact is,
> whilst we are at the best time in history for having computers
> represent
> many different languages clearly and consistently, we are
> still a long way
> from the level of support needed to give us strong confidence
> that people
> can always see what we intend them to see.
> 
> To illustrate, I will list all the eleven new top-level
> domains. On the left
> is the version your web browser wants to present to you, and
> on the right is
> how it should actually look.
> 
> إختبار
> آزÙ
ایشی
> 测试
> 測試
> испытание
> परीक्षा
> δοκιμή
> í
ŒìŠ¤íŠ¸
> טעסט
> テスト
> பரிட்சை
> 
> If you find some of the versions don't match, you would be in
> the majority
> of Internet users. The fact is most people cannot see these
> labels properly
> and consistently.
> 
> The most likely problem you will face is that there will be
> some labels that
> you simply cannot see, because your computer does not have any
> font that can
> express the characters. When the correct font can not be found
> it will
> usually display something like the following:
> 
> Computers never come with the complete set of fonts that will
> allow it to
> show every possible IDN in the world. The primary concern is
> to supply fonts
> that allow the language used on the computer to work, and the
> rest are
> optional. Often this is fixed by downloading additional
> language packs for
> the missing languages, or specifically finding and installing
> fonts that
> support the wanted languages.
> 
> Finding fonts is sometimes only half the battle. English, on
> the scale of
> languages, is one of the simplest to represent by computer. It
> has 26
> letters, and they always look the same and are presented the
> same no matter
> what order they are in. Sure, they may be stylistic variants,
> but in terms
> of composing letters it is very simple.
> 
> Take a look at this:
> 
> On the left is the correct way to present this, but those of
> you that do
> have Arabic fonts may find that you see the version on the
> right. This is
> because Arabic has more complex rules on how letterforms
> should be connected
> and formed. Some software is more accurate than others on how
> it does this.
> 
> The same issue may present itself in Devanagari script:
> 
> Again, on the right you can see the composing is not working
> correctly.
> 
> If you're really unlucky, for the Arabic version you may be
> seeing this:
> 
> This comes about because Arabic is written right-to-left.
> English, on the
> other hand, is written left-to-right. However, this corrupted
> example of
> Arabic has been written left-to-right - .siht ekil etorw I if
> sa
> 
> Ordering problems may also arise when fully blown domain names
> are used.
> Imagine a domain like maps.google.com. Now imagine it showing
> up as
> com.google.maps. That's confusing, but imagine the confusion
> of
> google.com.maps, or worst of all, as google.com.spam. These
> are some of the
> variants that have shown when right-to-left ordering issues
> appear due to
> software problems. (More on this issue is in this presentation
> from the
> Israel ccTLD registry.)
> 
> Apart from the visual display issue, there can also be issues
> simply in
> transmitting these domains in communications. The DNS has been
> carefully
> upgraded to support these new domains, but that doesn't mean
> you will get a
> consistent experience in other areas. In a discussion on these
> new test
> domains on an Internet mailing list, one person found they
> were showing like
> this:
> 
> This is because the encoding in the email is incorrect.
> Generally speaking,
> to fully express all the possible IDNs you need to use an
> encoding like
> UTF-8. However, ISO 8859-1 is often the default on many mail
> programs for
> users of English and other Western European languages. The
> result of viewing
> UTF-8 encoded labels in ISO 8859-1 results in the
> undecipherable letter soup
> you see above. If you've ever received foreign spam that just
> looked like a
> list of random letters, this is probably why.
> 
> This is just touching on the number of problems that can
> express themselves
> when dealing with the world's languages and scripts. With the
> release of the
> evaluative top-level domains, it will provide additional
> opportunity to
> identify these types of problems, and work with software
> vendors and other
> parties to help improve their applications so these issues
> will no longer
> occur.
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