Issues lists and the "preprocessing" topic : requirement for policy

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 08:48:04PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:

>    Mark writes about Section 4.4: "While exact policies are not
>    specified as part of IDNA2008 and it is expected that
>    different registries may specify different policies, there
>    SHOULD be policies." This SHOULD is pointless, unless some
>    constraints or guidance are given. Otherwise my policy could
>    be "any valid IDNA label", which would be precisely the same
>    as no policy at all.

>    Comment:

>    implementers evaluate per-zone policies and respond with
>    decisions about what to display.  So, I don't think this is
>    pointless.  The problem is whether different language would
>    better describe the handoff.

I have a great deal of sympathy with the idea that we ought to say,
"If you are implementing this, you ought to have a policy."  I also
have a great deal of sympathy with the observation that, in the
absence of guidance on how to express those policies and also in the
absence of any automatic way to find out what the policies are, it's
sort of difficult to see the point of the text.  I wonder whether it
would be worth developing a way of expressing such policies.  

Such a development, I note, would go a long way to making plain the
meaning of the charter item, "Separate requirements for valid IDNs at
registration time (insertion of names into DNS zone files), vs. at
resolution time (looking up those names)."

Is there any interest in such work?  (I fully expect someone to tell
me it's out of scope given the charter.  I'm not actually asking the
WG to adopt work that isn't expressed as an I-D yet, though, please note.)

A

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Andrew Sullivan
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