New version, draft-faltstrom-idnabis-tables-02.txt, available

[Harald Alvestrand]

>
> I disagree about the usefulness of Rule H "Stable scripts", which
> attempts to give IDN primacy to Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic on
> the grounds that they "have encodings [that] are stable enough
> for use in IDNs." On the contrary, many of the issues addressed
> by some of the other rules (instability under NFKC(cp) and
> instability under casefold(cp)) are most pronounced and problematical
> precisely for the *Latin* script, whereas many of the scripts
> supposedly "not stable enough" have no casing issues and few
> if any NFKC issues. Furthermore, I consider it silly and
> a complete non-starter to go out with a draft definition of
> a property for defining what characters are suitable for IDNs,
> but which sticks basic Japanese all in the MAYBE category.
I believe the intent of this is to communicate that:

- We (as in "the community", not "the editing team") have experienced 
that a number of scripts have issues that are not resolved, or not 
completely resolved, at this time.
- For some scripts, we're pretty certain there are no issues - or, 
rather, that the community's settled down to a specific set of tradeoffs 
that are unlikely to change.

The rules here are relatively new, and the exact way in which they're 
going to interact with these scripts isn't knowable without doing a 
fairly detailed review. Of course, the review might be short for cases 
where there are no casing problems, no joining/nonjoining problems, no 
problems with combining characters, directionality and so on - the 
singling out of the LGC scripts is done just because we're fairly 
confident about them.

If you're fairly confident that there are no issues to resolve with 
basic Japanese, and basic Japanese is a single value (or set of values?) 
of the Script property, then adding that (those?) to the initial set 
would seem like a Good Idea.

This draft is still conspicuously silent on the question of who gets to 
determine when scripts move into the Rule H "stable" set. It tries to 
make it very clear that there *will* be such movement.

                       Harald