Independent Submission A. El-Sherbiny
Request for Comments: 5564 M. Farah
Category: Informational UN-ESCWA
ISSN: 2070-1721 I. Oueichek
Syrian Telecom Establishment
A. Al-Zoman
SaudiNIC, CITC
February 2010
Linguistic Guidelines for the Use of
the Arabic Language in Internet Domains
Abstract
This document constitutes technical specifications for the use of
Arabic in Internet domain names and provides linguistic guidelines
for Arabic domain names. It addresses Arabic-specific linguistic
issues pertaining to the use of Arabic language in domain names.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other
RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at
its discretion and makes no statement about its value for
implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by
the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5564.
El-Sherbiny, et al. Informational [Page 1]RFC 5564 Arabic Character Guidelines February 2010Copyright Notice
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Arabic Language-Specific Issues .................................3
2.1. Linguistic Issues ..........................................4
2.1.1. Diacritics (Tashkeel) and Shadda ....................4
2.1.2. Kasheeda or Tatweel (Horizontal Character
Size Extension) .....................................5
2.1.3. Character Folding ...................................5
2.2. Supported Character Set ....................................6
2.3. Arabic Linguistic Issues Affected by Technical
Constraints ................................................8
2.3.1. Numerals ............................................8
2.3.2. The Space Character .................................8
3. Summary and Conclusion ..........................................8
4. Security Considerations .........................................9
5. Acknowledgments .................................................9
6. References ......................................................9
6.1. Normative References .......................................9
6.2. Informative References .....................................9
1. Introduction
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) issued in March 2003 a set
of RFCs for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) ([1], [2], and [3]),
which were planned to become the de facto standard for all languages.
In 2007 and 2008, the following working drafts were released that
propose revisions to the IDNA protocol:
o Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA):
Background, Explanation, and Rationale [5]
El-Sherbiny, et al. Informational [Page 2]RFC 5564 Arabic Character Guidelines February 2010
o Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA): Protocol
[6]
o An updated IDNA criterion for right-to-left scripts [7]
o The Unicode code points and IDNA [8]
These documents are known collectively as "IDNA2008".
This document constitutes a technical specification for the
implementation of the IDN standards in the case of the Arabic
datatracker.ietf.org