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

Harald Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Wed Dec 3 21:50:02 CET 2008


Alireza Saleh wrote:
> 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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>> Idna-update at alvestrand.no
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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'.
I'm saying that the fact that someone uses the Extended Arabic-Indic 
Digit 5 as if it was a heart symbol should have no weight in the 
discussion on whether the restriction against using Extended 
Arabic-Indic Digit 5 in the same label as the Arabic-Indic Digit 5 
should be a protocol restriction or a registry-level restriction.

That's all. I never even tried to suggest banning numbers in general.

                          Harald



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