Interoperability testing for internationalized domain names
September 23 - 27, 2003
Welcome to the site for IDNConnect. The online event greatly enhanced the usefulness of internationalized domain names by testing software that uses the IDNA protocols.
The IDNConnect workshop, held online during the fourth week of September 2003, was attended by eight organizations from all over the world representing a wide variety of internationalized Internet software. The workshop succeeded in primary goals of improving the interoperability of IDNA-enabled software, and proving that the IDNA specification is ready to move forwards on standards track in the IETF.
The testbed used in the IDNConnect event consisted of over 120 tests of using international characters in domain names. Participants in IDNConnect tested web browsers and plug-ins, mail clients, zone editing programs, and programming toolkits that will be used by other developers who want to use the IDNA standard (RFCs 3490, 3491, and 3492) in their own software.
While some interoperability events are used to show how well individual packages work with a standard, IDNConnect's primary focus was to help developers see where their software did and did not yet conform to the IDNA standard. Almost all participants said that the event help them find bugs in their software, although most of those bugs were in the "edge cases" of the standard that few typical users would possibly experience. All those participants also said that the event allowed them to fix their software during the event so they could verify that the bugs were fixed.
Part of the IETF standards process is to validate that a specification has multiple interoperable implementations that are derived from different sources. The fact that many IDNConnect participants could show that they fully complied with the standard by the end of the event will help in a report that will be prepared for the IETF in order to move the RFCs from Proposed Standard to Draft Standard.
IDNConnect was sponsored and paid for by JDNA, the Japanese Domain Names Association. The JDNA promotes the active deployment of Japanese domain names in Japan and throughout the world. JDNA's support of IDNConnect meant that there were no registration fees for the participating organizations.
Further, JDNA has announced that it is making the tests from the event's testbed freely available from the IDNConnect web site to developers of IDNA-aware software. This will allow all developers of internationalized software, whether or not they participated in the IDNConnect event, to test their software against the suite that was used during IDNConnect. The tests will be maintained and added to in the future based on input from the wider Internet community. As part of the development of the testbed, JDNA sponsored the creation of a complete set of interoperability tests for the entire IDNA specification.
For more information on the IDNConnect event, please contact the JDNA secretariat at <idnconnect@jdna.jp>. If you have any questions about this site or the testbed, please contact Paul Hoffman, the convener of the event, by sending mail to <phoffman@imc.org>, or by phoning +1 831-426-9827.
IDNConnect was sponsored by