Mapping (was: Issues lists and the "preprocessing" topic)

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, 22 August, 2008 19:30 -0400 Vint Cerf
<vint at google.com> wrote:

> If I can express a personal preference it would be to move
> towards (3) in as factual a way as possible. I would be hoping
> for something like:
> 
> IDNA2003 did things THIS way and they had the following
> implications.
> IDNA2008 does things THAT way and the change is partly the
> result of experience (cite some??) and partly a result of WG
> deliberations and re-thinking in the light of experience.  the
> implications of the differences are: a), b) c)...

>From my point of view and quibbles about particular wording
aside, that was exactly where we were with the immediately
pre-WG versions of the drafts.  I believe, at least judging from
the comments on the list from those who chose to make comments,
I was told to pull that material out as "critical of IDNA2003"
and "no longer useful".  

Nothing has been lost and I can put it back in again, but I'd
like to see enough opinions expressed that you can generate a
consensus call and, on that basis, tell me what to do.  For
obvious reasons, I don't want to put that material back in only
to be told to pull it out again.

> I don't know that it is possible to formulate the rationale
> document in such a way but it is the style that I am
> attempting to capture here, more than anything else.

I believe it is possible.  I believe that I would be likely to
need help from others to make the comparisons as neutral and
non-critical of IDNA2003 as possible (I'm not a particularly
neutral sort of person, as some have no doubt noticed).  If I
put the material back in and don't get that help, I'll do my
best to keep things neutral but, based on what happened with the
earlier drafts, the WG needs to be prepared for some language
that is more critical than some might like.  Put differently,
what we already know about IDNA is that any assertion we make
about what we have learned from experience will be debated by
someone who claims a different experience or interprets the
experience differently.   And any statement we make that says
"IDNA2003 did it this way, IDNA2008 does it a different way, and
we believe that the new way is better than the old way" is going
to be controversial and unpersuasive unless we identify the ways
in which the old way caused problems or made a tradeoff that we
now believe should have been made differently.

    john