WG Review: Internationalized Domain Name (idn)

[Paul Hoffman]

At 6:09 PM -0500 2/28/08, Sam Hartman wrote:
>The charter says that the work is organized based on these drafts.
>There is a consensus call to determine if the drafts can be accepted.
>IF that fails, you don't have consensus to go forward with your 
>chartered work so you are stuck with a recharter.

I think I see the disconnect. It's a difference in viewing WG 
formation without a BoF between different IESG members. This has 
always been a contentious area.

To be clear: I want the WG to form around the ideas from text in the 
charter, but with flexibility on the structure and format for the 
output documents. Given that, here is a replacement for the last two 
bits of my original note:

>The work is currently organized into four deliverables, all
>Standards Track. The WG will verify that it has consensus
>to adopt the proposed documents as a starting point. The
>Overview document with explanation and rationale is intended
>for Standards Track status because it has definitions and
>other normative text required by the other documents. The
>protocol specification explains how to map non-ASCII
>characters into ASCII DNS labels. It relies normatively on
>two other documents that are separate for readability: the
>bidirectional algorithm specification and the character
>validity tables. The validity of characters in IDNs is
>almost exclusively based on Unicode properties but is
>organized as tables and categories for readability.

This paragraph sounds like the WG needs to keep the four documents 
separated. The previous IDN WG got a fair amount or criticism for our 
decision to split the protocol into four documents; this WG shouldn't 
be bound to do the same unless it really wants to. A proposed change 
would be to reword the first two sentences as follows:

The work is currently organized (though not constrained in 
organization) as four Standards Track documents. If the WG does not 
come to early consensus around the general direction from this 
charter, the WG will need to stop and recharter so that the IETF can 
understand what the WG proposes to do.

Then, delete the rest of the paragraph because it describes the 
documents that have already been referenced.

Given this change, I would amend my call for more reasonable milestones to:

Mar 08: WG formation
Apr 08: WG agreement to the direction from the charter
Apr 08: Decision on form and structure of the WG document set
Aug 08: WG Last Call on WG document set
Oct 08: IETF Last Call on WG document set

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium