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        draft-bakleh-reg-adm-acg-apu-01.txt 
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2005/06/24 20:39:16     1.1
Internationalized Domain           Editors : Mhd. Elfatih Altijani.
Names Registration and                  Khaled Al Ahmad.
Administration Guidelines               Omar Bakleh.
for Arabic Characters Group             Reem Dannan.
of Languages 
(Arabic, Persian, Urdu,...)        Authors: Rifaah Ekrema
<draft-bakleh-reg-adm-acg-apu-01.txt>   Fidaa Aljundi
[Target Category: Standards Track]      Mohamed A. Elhamalaway, Ph.D.
Expires: February, 10, 2005             Rashed Zantout, Ph.D.
                                        Ahmad Alkassoum, Ph.D.
                                        AbdulRahman Aljadhai Ph.D.
                                        Yasir El Ameen
                                        Sameh Nouh
                                        Sami Taieb Alasmaa
                                        September, 8, 2004    

      
By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents
that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he
or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of
which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in
accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.

             Internationalized Domain Names Registration and 
        Administration Guidelines for Arabic Characters Group of 
                Languages (Arabic, Persian, Urdu,...)


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.



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Abstract:
   This document provides guidelines for zone administrators(including 
   but not limited to registry operators and registrars), and
   information for all domain names holders, on the administration of
   those domain names which contain characters drawn from Arabic
   Characters Group of Languages. Other language groups are encouraged
   to develop their own guidelines as needed, based on these guidelines
   if that is helpful.

   The document gives basic guidelines for IDN registrars (as it 
   is the case for IETF Document that talks about Japanese, Chinese 
   and Korean domain name registration "RFC 3490"). The document 
   provides also information for owners of IDN that contains Arabic 
   characters on name reservation process. The document does not cover 
   Arabic gTLD or ccTLD problems.

   Comments on this document can be sent to the authors at
   address@hidden



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Table of content:

   0. Pre-Note for ASCII-version of this document.................4

   1. Introduction................................................4

   2. Specialty of Arabic Characters Group of languages...........4

   3. Arabic Domain Names Recommendations.........................5

   4. Basics of searching for Arabic Domain Names.................7

   5. Ways of saving an Arabic Domain Name........................7

   6. Administration framework of Arabic Domain names.............8

   7. Principles underlying these guidelines......................8

   8. Registration of IDL.........................................8

   9. Versioning of the language character variant tables.........9

   10. Technical Recommendations.................................10

   11. Full Copyright Statement..................................10

   12. Security Considerations...................................11

   13. IANA Considerations.......................................11

   14. References................................................11

   15. Terms.....................................................11

   16. Authors...................................................12



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0. Pre-Note for ASCII-version of this document

   In order to make meanings clear, especially in examples used 
   to clarify some ideas, such examples will be written using their 
   Unicode representation according to Unicode Standard 3.0.


1. Introduction:

   Introducing domain names as addresses on the internet added a 
   new vision to the Internet, it made internet addresses easy to 
   remember, and meaningful more than using sequences of numbers that 
   does not mean any thing to their user. Nowadays Internet users are 
   looking forward to surf on the net using more meaningful names in 
   their own language. Such names are called Internationalized Domain 
   Names (IDNs). This demand opened a wide field of research and ideas 
   as wide as the diversity of languages used by the people on the 
   earth. Each of these languages has its own writing and reading 
   rules. This fact threatens the integrity and the stability of 
   Internet, unless we invent a good solution that respects and 
   controls this mixture of rules and cultures and represents it with 
   a unique, robust and easy-to-use way.


2. Specialty of Arabic Characters Group of Languages:

   Arabic language is the official language of 22 countries; it is 
   also used by more than 43 Islamic countries that use Arabic 
   characters and scripts. In other words more than one billion 
   potential users could be interested in Arabic Domain Names. The 
   Arabic language as well as all Arabic Characters Group of Languages 
   (Persian, Urdu, Pashto, ..) has many specialties that have to be 
   considered when specifying any solution for Arabic Domain Names. 
   The main specialties of these languages are summed up in the 
   following:

        1.2. Scripts are written from right to left.

        2.2. The shapes of the character change in most cases according
        to its location in the word.

        2.3. Characters within the word are mostly conjugated with 
        preceding and succeeding characters.

        2.4. Some characters does not conjugate with following character.



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        2.5. The structure of the sentence starts from the most general to 
        the more specific (the opposite of the English language) 
        (Internet draft) in Arabic is said:( draft {of} Internet).


        2.6. Special characters called Tashkeel are used in order to give 
        the right pronunciation for the word which affects the meaning.
        In other words tashkeel can give one word two or More different
        meanings. Tashkeel is not a seprate character by itself, 
        but it modifies a normal Arabic character to give it the right
        pronuciation It has to be noted here that word meaning is mostly
        known from the context of the sentence or even the phrase in which
        the word is used. For Internet names these special signs have to
        be included but their application in the Internet Domain Names
        could be delayed for the time being.

        2-7. Correct words are written in a unique way, but the character 
        shaddah (U+0651); which falls under the tashkeel signs and 
        means doubling the letter associated with it; sometimes is 
        implicit in the word and sometimes is written. In these two 
        cases the same word; with or without shaddah; has (often) the 
        same meaning; but in some cases shaddah can change the 
        meaning of the word. So to decide considering or ignoring 
        such character an algorithm has to implemented.

        2.8. Correct orthographical practices about Hamza associated with 
        or without Alef and Yeh have to be followed. The same applies 
        to Yeh, Heh and Teh Marbuta.


3. Arabic Domain Names Recommendations: 

   3.1. Arabic domain names must allow the use of (SPACE) 
   character. This condition is vital, as Arabic characters (as cited 
   above) can be conjugated with each other and have different shapes 
   depending on their position in the word. If we do not allow the 
   space, words that form the ADL will be misread and misunderstood by 
   the users. The use of dash character (-) to separate words is NOT 
   acceptable according to IDNA (RFC-3490) which prevents the use of 
   characters that belong to another language when reserving a name 
   for a certain language, besides the fact that this character is not 
   used in Arabic, giving an odd view of the domain name.



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   3.2. Solving the issue that results form shaddah could be done 
   by an algorithm that generates all possible synonyms that results 
   from the implicit existence of shaddah. Grammatical rules that 
   controls the implicit existence of shaddah do exist. Such procedure 
   will prevent registering the same word that contains shaddah more 
   than once according to the existence or the absence of this 
   implicit shaddah by different individuals. Explicit shaddah which 
   does not come from grammatical rules have to be treated as a 
   character, so the registration system have to consider the 
   existence or the absence of this shaddah as a differentiator 
   between different domain names.
      
   3.3. Tashkeel Embodiment [Shadda (U+0651), Fatha (U+064E), Damma 
   (U+064F), Kasra (U+0650) and Superscript Aleph (U+0670)] must be 
   taken in the accredited character table, as it will give the 
   possibility to register one name more than once by using these 
   tashkeel characters with some or all alphabetical characters of a 
   certain name (there are 8 possible usage of tashkeel characters 
   that can be used with every other character). In spite of the need 
   to use these characters for correct Arabic Domain Names, we can 
   postpone using these five characters for future use. So tashkeel 
   characters have to be added to the accepted character set of Arabic 
   Domain Names but they have to be ignored currently in the 
   registration system. Meanwhile registration systems have to equate 
   Alef Maksura (U+0649) with Yeh (U+064A) in their processing 
   preventing registering more than one domain name based on these two 
   characters.
      
   3.4. Future standards for Arabic Domain Names have to abide to 
   the specificity of the Arabic characters group of languages, which 
   is also valid for all other language groups. A special attention is 
   drawn to (RFC 3490) which does not allow mixing characters from any 
   group of languages with characters belonging to another group.
      
   The above recommendations are valid for Persian, Pashto and Urdu 
   and other languages which use Arabic Characters.



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4. Basics of searching for Arabic Domain Names:

   Name variants must be considered when searching an ADL, if any 
   name in an ADL package is the subject of a name resolving query, a 
   positive answer is to be given if the package was reserved (except 
   when using one of that common abbreviations). The resolving system 
   on the client side must not ignore tashkeel for future 
   developments, and it should abide to the rules dealing with 
   shaddah.


5. Ways of saving an Arabic Domain Name:

   5.1. Reservation of an ADL:

        As it is mentioned above, similarity cases (Name variants) must 
        be considered when reserving an Arabic domain name, all names 
        resulting from the similarity cases must be reserved, this will 
        prevent reserving different Arabic names that actually indicates 
        the same content by different persons. We can use the following 
        steps when reserving an Arabic domain name:

        IN = IDL to be registered
        if Is Valid(IN)  then
        Begin
           For each Name in [Names variants of (IN)] do
             If Is Valid (Name) Then
                 Reserve Name
             End If
           End For
        End If

        Where ŸIs Valid÷ as some algorithm that verifies if that the name 
        is compliant with the ADLs standards? We will call the ADL variants 
        as ADL package.

        Registering town, city and country names as well as names bearing 
        pure religious meanings could not be registered as Arabic Domain 
        Names. At the same time the system should not allow registering 
        names having meanings that contradict the culture of the people of 
        the Arabic characters group of languages. The system must also 
        abandon registering linguistically non-correct names.



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   5.2. Activation and deactivation of an ADL:

        If any name of an ADL package is to be activated or deactivated 
        ALL names within the ADL package must be activated and deactivated 
        at the same time, the administration system must provide some 
        mechanism to insure this process.

   5.3. Deleting an ADL:
        All names in an ADL package must be deleted when any name in the 
        package is requested to be deleted.

   
6. Administration framework of Arabic Domain Names:

   The ADL Administration framework is responsible of affording a 
   mechanism that respects all the previous conditions of dealing with 
   an ADL.


7. Principles underlying these guidelines:

   The previous guidelines must be considered with all Arabic 
   characters group of languages. Registration systems for each 
   language could be separated so that every language has its own 
   registration systems. At the same time coordination between these 
   systems is required to prevent reserving some words that have the 
   same writing in more than one language but may have different 
   meaning in another language.
   
   This must not affect the integrity of the Internet, as users of 
   a certain national domain name must be able to use domain names of 
   an other nationality. This can be accomplished by giving each 
   nationality of those who use the same characters a special string 
   as a Nationality Identifier (or NID). This NID will help the ADL 
   resolving system to determine the parameters of the " ToAscii " 
   function (RFC 3490).


8. Registration of Arabic ADL:

   ALL the names contained in an ADL package must be reserved 
   automatically by the reservation system. This will prevent 
   registering ADLs that have the same meaning but written differently 
   by more than one person.



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9. Versioning of the language character variant tables:

   It is recommended to use the last version of the UNICODE. Only 
   the following Unicode characters are accepted in Arabic domain 
   names (according to Arabic Language standards).
    
U+0020                SPACE
U+0621                ARABIC LETTER HAMZA
U+0622                ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH MADDA
U+0623                ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH HAMZA
U+0624                ARABIC LETTER WAW WITH HAMZA
U+0625                ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH HAMZA BELOW
U+0626                ARABIC LETTER YEH WITH HAMZA ABOVE

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