LOS ANGELES - The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (lCANN) announced the release of the third version of the Maximal Starting Repertoire (MSR-3). According to the Corporation, this version is upwardly compatible with MSR-2 and adds three code points each to the repertoires of Han and Latin scripts. Under the Procedure to Develop and Maintain Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone with Respect to IDN Labels [PDF, 72 KB], the MSR is the starting point for the work by community-based Generation Panels which are developing the proposals for relevant scripts for the Root Zone Label Generation Rules (RZ-LGR). The contents of MSR-3 and the detailed rationale behind its development are described in MSR-3-Overview and Rationale [PDF, 242 KB]. The RZ-LGR is a mechanism for determining valid IDN top-level domain labels and their variant labels.

 

MSR-3 covers the following 28 scripts: Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada, Katakana, Khmer, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thaana, Tibetan, and Thai. For these scripts, MSR-3 contains 33,496 code points short-listed from 97,973 PVALID/CONTEXT code points of Unicode version 6.3.

 

In addition to selecting their repertoire from within the MSR for developing the RZ-LGR proposals, Generation Panels will also evaluate whether any such code points are variant code points and if any rules are needed to further constrain the labels generated using these code points. The resulting RZ-LGR proposals by the Generation Panels will be released for public comment before they are reviewed by the Integration Panel for integration into the RZ-LGR.

 

MSR-3 defers code points that are already encoded in later releases of Unicode. In addition, the Integration Panel monitors any scripts not included in the MSR for indications change in the MSR is warranted. Until such a change of the MSR, MSR-3 will be the foundation for any RZ-LGR versions developed. All future versions of the MSR and all versions of the RZ-LGR must retain full backwards compatibility.