Introduction to Chinese Domain Name

ZHANG HongZhangh@cnnic.cn

Aug 24, 2003

Agenda

IDN CDN Current Status

IDN

IDN （ Internationalized Domain Name ）

Introduce international characters into DNS

Main technical specification IDNA Nameprep （ stringprep ） ACE (punycode)

IDN Architecture

CDN

CDN(Chinese Domain Name) Using Chinese Characters in DNS Characters in CDN: Letters （ A-

Z ， a-z), Digital （ 0-9 ） , “-” , Chinese Characters(about 20,000)

Delimiter: “.” equals to “ 。” , For user input convenience

Related Organization

IETF: IDN WG JET (Joint Engineer Team)

CNNIC 、 JPNIC 、 TWNIC 、 KRNIC 、 HKNIC 、 MONIC,etc.. (CJK)

CDNC （ Chinese Domain Name Consortium ） CNNIC 、TWNIC 、 HKNIC 、 MONIC.

Regulation and Standard

Chinese Ministry of Information Industry

No. [2002] 555 No. [2002] 429 IETF

RFC3490 ， RFC3491 ， RFC3492， RFC3454

Character (or Code) Variants

Character (or Code) variants refer to variants that are generated by character-by-character (or code-by-code) substitution

Example, In English would be "A" or "a" In Chinese would be 飛 (U+98DB) or 飞

(U+98DE) and 機 (U+6A5F) or 机 (U+673A)Plane ：飞机，飛機，飞機，飛机

ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode) unifies the Han Ideograph, which is used by Chinese. Japanese and Korean, CJK have its variants and language issues

Nameprep did not handle these variants, therefore, there are multiple possible variants for one IDN (in CJK)

Character (or Code) Variants

Solutions

IDN-Admin-GuidelineIDN Registration and Administration

Guideline for CJK

Currently IETF Draft

CDN Architecture

Load Punycode Data

CDN user input

Convert Local encoding into Unicode

IDNA

Punycode encoding

CDN TC/SC redundancy Data

Application-CDN supported

DNS server Application server

e.g. Email server Web server

CDN TC/SC equivalence

How it Work?

registrationRRP/EPP

delegation

resolution

Registrar

Registry

DNS AdminisrtatorDNS

Server(s)

IDNARegistration&Administration Guideline

CDN Current Application

Input in Browser ： http://中文.cn CNNIC CDN client

Some browsers support IETF Standard Mozilla （ Netscape ）

Open Source Software GNU LibIDN

http://josefsson.org/libidn/ Others …

CNNIC CDN Client • WEB Browser

– CDN-> Punycode– Support Multiple IMEs– Win98, WinMe, Win2000, WinXP….– Internet Explorer 4.0.1 and Up

• Email– According to IETF RFC/Draft – Support username in Chinese characters– Convert user@CDN in To/CC email bar to Punycode, give

user new experience about mail address in Chinese characters

Organizational StructureOrganizational Structure

RegistryRegistry ：： CNNICCNNICMaintain the central database of domain namesAdministration and policy maker

RegistrarsRegistrars ：： 23+ Registrars within China23+ Registrars within ChinaProvide customers with registration services

Agents (Resellers)Agents (Resellers) ：： over 2,000, authorized over 2,000, authorized by the 23+ registrarsby the 23+ registrars

Thanks!