[12481] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Thu May 19 00:52:50 1994
Date: Wed, 18 May 1994 23:39:58 -0400
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@sprint.net>
To: com-priv@psi.com
>So what's the answer, is it .moscow., .moskva, .mockba., all of them,
>one of them, what?
.msk.su
Does not make any sense to keep full names for often-used domains when
abbreviated form is fairly recognizeable.
>Do we insist on transliterating to Latin-1 (or even USASCII)?
YES. It's the only common character set. You want everybody to
be able to use your address.
>Do we try to eventually encode all of UNICODE into geographic domain
>names? Do we allow 8-bit characters? 16-bit? More? Do we just hope
>this issue is never raised or just say "USASCII end of discussion"?
UNICODE is dead-born. It creates more problems than solves. I won't
repeat here all arguments i presented a year ago in comp.std.intl. Essentially,
UNICODE makes impossible even trivial case-insensitive comparisons
and does not provide *any* reasonable algorithmic sorting. It's already
a kiss-of-death on using UNICODE for domain names.
To do those trivial operations on UNICODE texts the programs need to
have some external indication of the language in use -- rich text or
environment settings -- BUT if you have this information you can use
trivial alphabetical 1-byte encodings for most languages making texts
files twice smaller than UNICODE files! People who designed UNICODE
have serious problems with logical thinking.
So for any reasonable future it's "USASCII -- end of discussion".
Actually Latin-1 is so wide-spread outside English-speaking countries
that many locals find it cool to use Latin characters for names of
their companies and products. I used to work in two private companies
in Russia -- named DEMOS and RELCOM (the first is transcribed abbreviation
from cyrillic, and the second is an actual English acronim). Half of
private companies in Moscow (Russia) do not have cyrillic letters in
their names.
>Can one even code something as common as an umlauted character into
>this geographic scheme? What if two place names differ only by one of
>these diacritical marks, within the same country? Is that a problem?
Use different abbreviations. Look how airlines and weather services
handle the situation.
>Does anyone have one example of an existant phone system that uses
>three digits in its least significant portion?
Quite a lot of mid-size PBXes do :-) Also, my home phone number
was 53-226 for quite some time (in a small city...).
>Are there more than about 100 conventions used throughout the world?
You should have followed the reference to Borges i provided; his
conclusion is that there cannot possibly be a global classification which
is useful and not riddled with exceptions, special cases, questionable
aggregations and mis-attributions at the same time!
A mnemonic name is always a simplifyed model (or image) of the real-life
phenomenon; making names precise requires detailed listing of all aspects
of the phenomenon, indeed, presenting a copy of the phenomenon (somebody
offered using DNA sequences already; also see Stanislav Lem's "Sum Of
Technology" [hidden pun on Thomas of Aquinas :-)] -- "The ideal precise
model of a cat is the cat itself.").
Thus, we shouldn't be concerned with selecting "one true" naming scheme;
remembering addresses/numbers/etc will *always* be necessary. We only
need to care about making it easy to use, easy to understand and
technologically feasible.
Migration is not a problem -- mail forwading and aliasing is easy
and practically free to keep. I have all my old e-mail accounts still
useable. Try to do that with telephones :-)
DNS is popular because it provides an easy way to build easy-to-remember
and reasonably short unique names. avg@sprint.net is much easier to remember
than 17039042013 and 18006698303 (which happened to be the telephone
numbers i can be reached at).
X.121 (that's what you're advocating) -- just say no.
--vadim
DISCLAIMER The statement(s) above represent my personal opinion(s) ONLY
and in no way should be interpreted as position(s) of
my present and/or former employers. This message is NOT and
is NOT intended to be an offical statement or presentation
by Sprint and/or any other organization.
