A Web redirection service for variant Chinese domain name resolution

Many efforts in past years have been made to lower the linguistic barriers for non-native English speakers to access the Internet. IDNA (Faltstrom et al., 2003) focuses on access to internationalized domain names (IDN) in a range of scripts that is broader in scope than the original ASCII. However, the use of character variants that have similar appearances and/or interpretations could create confusion. A variant IDL (internationalized domain label), derived from an IDL by replacing some characters with their variants, should match the original IDL. In JET Guidelines (Konishi et al., 2004), it is suggested that zone administrators model this concept of equivalence as an atomic IDL package that contains the variant IDLs generated according to the language variant tables (LVT). In addition to the registered IDL, some of the variant IDLs are activated and stored in the zone files and thus become resolvable. However, an issue of scalability arises when the number of the activated variant IDLs is large. In this paper, we present a mechanism to resolve the variant IDLs in an IDL package into the registered IDL. Specifically, we target Han character variants. Two Han characters are said to be variants of each other if they have the same meaning and are pronounced the same. Furthermore, Han character variants usually have similar appearances. We introduce a new resource record (RR) type, denoted as VarIdx, to associate the variant IDLs with the registered IDL. Experiment results show that a small number of VarIdx RRs are sufficient for enumerating all variant IDLs in an IDL package. We then present a redirection service that uses VarIdx RRs to redirect user requests with variant IDLs to the URLs with the corresponding registered IDLs.