Requirements document (Re: New version, draft-faltstrom-idnabis-tables-02.txt, available)

Simon Josefsson simon at josefsson.org
Mon Jun 18 10:24:40 CEST 2007


Martin Duerst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> writes:

> At 18:11 07/06/18, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> writes:
>>
>>> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>>> I suggest that every change to the IDNA protocols is clearly discussed
>>>> and motivated in a requirements document that is developed in parallel
>>>> with the IDNAbis document.
>>>
>>> Simon, have you read, identified your issues with, and commented on,
>>> draft-klensin-idnabis-issues-01?
>>
>>Yes, I posted my review in:
>>
>>http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/idna-update/2006-November/000015.html
>>
>>As far as I can tell, the -01 version still contains the flawed
>>description of how IDNA works today, it doesn't mention the PR-29
>>problem when changing from Unicode 3.2 to Unicode 5.0,
>
> Do you mean http://www.unicode.org/review/resolved-pri.html#pri29?

Yes.

> The issues document should probably mention this, because it's
> an issue in the sense that it has to be duely considered and
> checked of, but for everybody who has looked even a bit into
> this issue will understand that it's a non-issue, in the sense
> that applications should just upgrade to the new, correct
> version of normalization without any problems.

Well, upgrading would violate the current IDNA specification, and libidn
will maintain its implementation of the IDNA documents, see:

http://josefsson.org/libidn/manual/html_node/PR29-discussion.html
http://josefsson.org/libidn/manual/html_node/PR29-Functions.html#PR29-Functions

If the new IDNA specification changes anything wrt pr29, that will break
backwards compatibility for a set of strings, and I expect there to be
discussion about what the strategy to resolve this incompatibility will
be.

The strings doesn't occur in natural language, but may occur in
non-natural strings such as passwords, and my suggestion has been that
all the problematic strings should be rejected.  It only affects a small
number of strings.

/Simon


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