Registration and Administration Recommendations for Chinese Domain Names
RFC 4713

• Status
• IESG evaluation record
• IESG writeups
• Email expansions
• History

• Versions
• 08

Network Working Group                                             X. Lee
Request for Comments: 4713                                        W. Mao
Category: Informational                                            CNNIC
                                                                 E. Chen
                                                                  N. Hsu
                                                                   TWNIC
                                                              J. Klensin
                                                            October 2006

Registration and Administration Recommendations for Chinese Domain Names

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 (2006).

IESG Note

   This RFC is not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard.  The
   IETF disclaims any knowledge of the fitness of this RFC for any
   purpose and in particular notes that the decision to publish is not
   based on IETF review for such things as security, congestion control,
   or inappropriate interaction with deployed protocols.  The RFC Editor
   has chosen to publish this document at its discretion.  Readers of
   this document should exercise caution in evaluating its value for
   implementation and deployment.  See RFC 3932 for more information.

Abstract

   Many Chinese characters in common use have variants, which makes most
   of the Chinese Domain Names (CDNs) have at least two different forms.
   The equivalence between Simplified Chinese (SC) and Traditional
   Chinese (TC) characters is very important for CDN registration.  This
   memo builds on the basic concepts, general guidelines, and framework
   of RFC 3743 to specify proposed registration and administration
   procedures for Chinese domain names.  The document provides the
   information needed for understanding and using the tables defined in
   the IANA table registrations for Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

Lee, et al.                  Informational                      [Page 1]
RFC 4713        Recommendations for Chinese Domain Names    October 2006

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction ....................................................2
   2. Terminology .....................................................3
      2.1. Chinese Characters .........................................3
      2.2. Chinese Domain Name Label (CDNL) ...........................3
      2.3. Simplified Chinese Variant Table (SCVT) ....................4
      2.4. Traditional Chinese Variant Table (TCVT) ...................4
      2.5. Original Chinese Domain Name Label (OCDNL) .................4
   3. Procedure for Registration of Chinese Domain Name Labels ........4
      3.1. Terminology and Context ....................................4
      3.2. Procedure in Terms of the RFC 3743 Model ...................4
      3.3. RFC 3743 Optional Registry Processing ......................5
   4. Security Considerations .........................................5
   5. Acknowledgements ................................................6
   6. References ......................................................6
      6.1. Normative References .......................................6
      6.2. Informative References .....................................7

1.  Introduction

   With the standardization of Internationalized Domain Names for
   Application (IDNA, described in [RFC3490], [RFC3491], and [RFC3492]),
   internationalized domain names (IDNs), i.e., those that contain non-
   ASCII characters, are included in the DNS, and users can access the
   Internet with their native languages, most of which are not English.
   However, many languages have special requirements, which are not
   addressed in the IDNA RFCs.  One way to deal with some of the
   remaining issues involves grouping characters that could be confused
   together as "variants".  The variant approach is discussed in RFC
   4290 [RFC4290] and specifically for documents written in Chinese,
   Japanese, or Korean (CJK documents), in the so-called "JET
   Guidelines" RFC 3743 [RFC3743].  Readers of this document are assumed
   to be familiar with the concepts and terminology of the latter.  The
   guidelines specified in this document provide a set of specific
   tables and methods required to apply the JET Guidelines to Chinese
   characters.  For example, changes were made in the forms of a large
   number of Chinese characters during the last century to simplify
   writing and reading.  These "Simplified" characters have been adopted
   in some Chinese-speaking communities, while others continue to use
   the "Traditional" forms.  On the global Internet, if IDNA were used
   alone, there would be considerable potential for confusion if the two
   forms were not considered together.  Consequently, effective use of