Eszett (Sharp-S) - 3 (was AW: Comments on idnabis-rationale-01)

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, 08 August, 2008 12:46 +0200 Georg Ochsner
<g.ochsner at revolistic.com> wrote:

>> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
>> Von: Marcos Sanz/Denic
>> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 17. Juli 2008 09:51
> 
>> * Section 7.3: Just a naive question, no second meanings:
>> what reasons speak at the moment *against* including the
>> Eszett in the PVALID list under the category of exceptions?
>> Thanks.
> 
> In my opinion if Denic agrees or just doesn't mind to add the
> sharp s (Eszett), then it should be done.

FWIW, I tend to agree.  In a "no mapping" world, prohibiting a
character just because it historically case-folded into
something else is fairly hard to justify.  That justification
gets even harder when Unicode now includes an upper-case form
for the character so even the historical reason for the
case-folding is, well, history.

The people who have been depending on the mapping to turn a
string whose only non-ASCII character is Eszett into an
all-ASCII string are going to be hurt by dropping of the
guarantee of that mapping, independent of whether the character
is now added to the PVALID list.

Registries that don't want to see Eszett in domain names in
their zones should simply prohibit registrations in it, thereby
forcing everyone to use the "ss" form.

    john