On blame (was: Re: Casefolding Sigma (was: Re: IDNAbis Preprocessing Draft))

[Paul Hoffman]

At 7:29 AM -0500 1/22/08, Vint Cerf wrote:
>ietf will be blamed for every abuse that can be traced to overly 
>permissive application of Unicode. Every design choice IS policy, 
>even if you do not seem to see it that way.

Vint points to one of the guiding motivations for much of the IDNA 
effort in the last year before we released the standard. However, I 
think that motivation was a bad one, and one that actually caused us 
to make more mistakes than if we had shipped something more simple 
and clean.

Afterwards, people who spend more of their time in the IETF would 
often try to shift that blame on the Unicode Standard; people who 
spend more of their time in the Unicode Consortium would often try to 
shift that blame on the IETF process. And here we both are today on 
this mailing list, mostly frustrated and grumpy with each other.

I propose that the folks participating in this effort try to stop 
worrying about being blamed for errors. There will be plenty of blame 
and anger aimed at us (for some value of "us") regardless of whether 
the result is long and over-optimized or short and lacking enough 
special cases. We should design and deploy based on technical issues, 
not fear of blame.