[menog] New Arabic TLD and idea's popularity

[Ahmed Abu-Abed]

Eric,

I believe these issues are resolved. For example we can simply input 
دبي.امارات  and  عمان.الاردن (equivalent to dubai.emirates and amman.jordan) 
as we would in English, ie starting with city name then ccTLD, and get to 
the right page without concern for dot or LtoR or RtoL input. The browser is 
smart enough to figure the syntax and text direction by itself; I tried this 
on both Win 7 Explorer and iOS 6 Safari.

So the issue is back to why is there no widespread use; all IDN Arabic 
websites I have run across are run by government.

Regards,
-Ahmed


-----Original Message----- 
From: Eric (Maule) Brunner-Williams
Sent: Sunday, October 27, 2013 10:37 PM
To: Ahmed Abu-Abed
Cc: Tom Paseka ; menog at menog. net ; Eric (Maule) Brunner-Williams
Subject: Re: [menog] New Arabic TLD and idea's popularity

Ahmed points out the lack of right-to-left name spaces until recently,
there being only four initially (comming out of the ICANN IDN Testbed).

For those that don't follow this -- the Unicode BiDi algorithm treats
punctuation -- that is -- the dots we use to separate labels within a
FQDN -- as having directionality. This leads to amusing outcomes when
using a RtL script for a label and a LtR script for an adjacent label.

There are _issues_ with IDN uptake -- most of the Arab League namespaces
have policy restrictions -- not necessarily a bad thing in abstract but
in practice ... which is difficult to reconcile with a gTLD (I know, I
wrote a policy proposal in response to the League of Arab States' RFP(s)
for a gTLD application). Each also must decide what to do about Arabic
Chat Script (Arabic on restricted Latin keyboard devices, e.g., handsets),
which is a LtR script, and Latin (again, LtR), and what to do about the
accessibility (to regional hosting operators and end users) of localized
versions of the CMS packages and skins, and so on and on.

Eric