Follow-up from Tuesday's discussion of digits in the Latin and Arabic Script blocks

[Alireza Saleh]

Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>> Which brings me to true love, or the similarity of the "eastern 
>> arabic-indic" character for the digit "5" and the apparently human glyph 
>> for "heart", and also "emoji" enjoyed by CJK script users, and 
>> conceivably by Cree Syllabics and other script users. I suppose an 
>> emoticon is appropriate here, so ";-)".
>>
>>
>> There is, in the .ir namespace, a label which contains 
>> "from-my-heart-to-your-heart", with each "eastern arabic-indic" digit 
>> "5" rendered (correctly) as a heart.
>>
>>   
>>     
> Since the IDNA2008 effort long ago decided to ban symbols, including the 
> 11 "heart" symbols in Unicode (all of which are class "So"), fairness 
> would dictate that we give no special consideration to use of numbers as 
> symbols outside their linguistic context.
>
>                     Harald
>
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>   

I think that symbols and numbers are not entirely comparable; you don’t
completely ban numerals in the protocol. Nor can you ban their ASCII use
in non-numerical context. How could you ban <domains4you.com>? So the
question is what overwhelming technical requirement leads you to set a
double-standard for ASCII and IDN? You just need a better argument than
saying that numbers should be confined to 'their linguistic context' or 'Visual confusions'.


Alireza