UTC Agenda Item: IDNA proposal

[Michael Everson]

At 10:44 +0100 2006-11-24, Harald Alvestrand wrote:

>>That is by no means appropriate. You immediately render IDN unavailable
>>to Azerbaijan, for instance.
>
>For the edification of us who know less - can you please name the 
>codepoint in question, and what role it plays in the script?

The schwa (turned e).

>>Um. You're banning all independently combining characters? Then you
>>immediately render IDN unavailable to millions of Africans.
>>
>>Is this really what you are doing?
>
>Same question as above.

African languages use a variety of accents freely with consonants and vowels.

>We're pretty sure COMBINING LEFT RIGHT ARROW ABOVE (U+20E1) doesn't 
>make sense to allow in IDNs, I think. If we can't dump the whole 
>"inherited" script, we'll have to figure out some other distinction 
>that we can leverage; the first thing that needs doing is to figure 
>out which codepoint we think needs allowing.

This whole activity begins to depress me. Somebody please find the 
resources to engage me and/or other linguists to spend time on this. 
It's not getting done well from the Unicode side, and it's not 
getting done from the IETF side. I keep seeing interviews with Vint 
and Paul and other people on the web, in print newspapers, and so on 
about how important and volatile the IDN development is. They are 
right, of course, but honestly, the work is being done without proper 
advice.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com