RFC 3743: Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean | RFC Editor

Skip to content Primary navigationThe RFC SeriesFor AuthorsAbout UsHomeRFC 3743 View as: Plain Text, Compact HTML Info RFC 3743: Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Koreaninternet governanceDNSdomain registrationIDNApril 2004. K. Konishi, K. Huang, H. Qian, Y. KoInformationalSubscribe19 subscribed Add to Set Read aloud Network Working Group K. Konishi Request for Comments: 3743 K. Huang Category: Informational H. Qian Y. Ko April 2004 Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Status of this Memo This memo provides information for the Internet community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved. IESG Note The IESG congratulates the Joint Engineering Team (JET) on developing mechanisms to enforce their desired policy. The Language Variant Table mechanisms described here allow JET to enforce language-based character variant preferences, and they set an example for those who might want to use variant tables for their own policy enforcement. The IESG encourages those following this example to take JET's diligence as an example, as well as its technical work. To follow their example, registration authorities may need to articulate policy, develop appropriate procedures and mechanisms for enforcement, and document the relationship between the two. JET's LVT mechanism should be adaptable to different policies, and can be considered during that development process. The IETF does not, of course, dictate policy or require the use of any particular mechanisms for the implementation of these policies, as these are matters of sovereignty and contract. Abstract Achieving internationalized access to domain names raises many complex issues. These are associated not only with basic protocol design, such as how names are represented on the network, compared, and converted to appropriate forms, but also with issues and options for deployment, transition, registration, and administration. Konishi, et al. Informational [Page 1] RFC 3743 JET Guidelines for IDN April 2004 The IETF Standards for Internationalized Domain Names, known as "IDNA", focuses on access to domain names in a range of scripts that is broader in scope than the original ASCII. The development process made it clear that use of characters with similar appearances and/or interpretations created potential for confusion, as well as difficulties in deployment and transition. The conclusion was that, while those issues were important, they could best be addressed administratively rather than through restrictions embedded in the protocols. This document defines a set of guidelines for applying restrictions of that type for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts and the zones that use them and, perhaps, the beginning of a framework for thinking about other zones, languages, and scripts. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. Definitions, Context, and Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.1. Definitions and Context. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2. Notation for Ideographs and Other Non-ASCII CJK Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3. Scope of the Administrative Guidelines . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3.1. Principles Underlying These Guidelines . . . . . . . . . 10 3.2. Registration of IDL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.2.1. Using the Language Variant Table . . . . . . . . 13 3.2.2. IDL Package. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3.2.3. Procedure for Registering IDLs . . . . . . . . . 14 3.3. Deletion and Transfer of IDL and IDL Package . . . . . . 19 3.4. Activation and Deactivation of IDL Variants . . . . . . 19 3.4.1. Activation Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 3.4.2. Deactivation Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3.5. Managing Changes in Language Associations. . . . . . . . 21 3.6. Managing Changes to Language Variant Tables. . . . . . . 21 4. Examples of Guideline Use in Zones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 5. Syntax Description for the Language Variant Table. . . . . . . 25 5.1. ABNF Syntax. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 5.2. Comments and Explanation of Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . 25 6. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 7. Index to Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 8. Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 10. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 10.1. Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 10.2. Editors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 11. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Konishi, et al. Informational [Page 2] RFC 3743 JET Guidelines for IDN April 2004 1. Introduction Domain names form the fundamental naming architecture of the Internet. Countless Internet protocols and applications rely on them, not just for stability and continuity, but also to avoid ambiguity. They were designed to be identifiers without any language context. However, as domain names have become visible to end users through Web URLs and e-mail addresses, the strings in domain-name labels are being increasingly interpreted as names, words, or phrases. It is likely that users will do the same with languages of differing character sets, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK), in which many words or concepts are represented using short sequences of characters. The introduction of what are called Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) amplif