Underscores in host names

Fri May 20 09:10:34 UTC 2005

> You know what the constraints are -- no zone local semantics (e.g., case
> folding rules, courtesy H.A.) for a glyph repetoire that in some ranges
> is also a character set, no intermediate tables, no flag day(s) for 
apps,
> and so on.

It's sad that one of the constraints isn't for this to
be explained in plain English. Sometimes I think people
take jargon too far. Yes, we do need some special vocabulary
to talk about detailed technical things, but every time we
invent new vocabulary, we compartmentalize knowledge into
stovepipes and we prevent cross-fertilization with other
fields of knowledge.

> P.S. 17th century French lacked a "w" character, "8" is a "u" atop an 
"o".

And people who write Russian in mobile phone SMS
will often write things like

4to ti xo4esh videt?

Where the "4" represents "ch" and the two
occurences of "i" represent two separate
cyrillic letters.

Russia is an interesting country with respect to
domain names. Sometimes you will see a domain name
written in cyrillic characters that are intended to
be transliterated one-by-one into latin characters.
This is signified by using cyrillic for the .ru ending.
And sometimes you see a cyrillic domain name with
a russian word which is intended to be translated 
into the english word to form the domain name.

--Michael Dillon