baking into the protocol

[Paul Hoffman]

At 3:44 PM -0500 12/20/06, John C Klensin wrote:
>We have the reasonable expectation that
>protocol changes -- IDNA (and/or stringprep or nameprep)
>changes-- will be implemented globally.  Relying entirely on
>registry restrictions, or user agent restrictions that
>completely forbid the use of some names that can be registered,
>is a recipe for fragmentation of the DNS namespace.

Fully agree.

>There is another problem with prohibiting script-mixing at the
>protocol (IDNA) level and that is that the common,
>on-the-street, perception of "the script we use" is different
>from the Unicode definitions of "script".  No one is wrong here,
>but, if JDNC concludes that Romanji is a necessity and must be
>available in mixed names with Kanji and Kana, I don't think we
>are in a position to say "no" (although we can _advise_ that
>this isn't a good idea).  Similar examples arise with mixtures
>of Cyrillic and Roman characters in Russia, even though we are
>agreed that is one of the more dangerous cases of mixed-script
>labels (the fact that some strings in Cyrillic can be confused
>with names in Latin characters even when they are purely
>Cyrillic is one of the arguments why prohibiting mixed scripts
>isn't nearly as powerful a tool as is often argued).

Quite right.