RFC 3743 (rfc3743) - Page 2 of 33

Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

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