ALWAYS/MAYBE and CJK (was: Re: IDNAbis Main Open Issues)

[Gervase Markham]

Michael Everson wrote:
> I was cheered by what Gervase said about displaying final sigma. I hope 
> that the Mozilla and Safari and IE get together and agree on a method to 
> do the right thing for the Greeks.

I can't bind any of those organisations, even my own, but if it turns 
out that the final-sigma problem is intractable at the protocol level 
(and perhaps esszet as well, I don't know), and it's clear that we're 
not opening an enormous can of worms which will lead to proliferating 
special-case code, then if it helps us get this done quicker, the 
IDN200x standard can punt on the issues and we can attempt to reach a 
consensus higher up.

It seems to me that final sigma's a fairly easy case, as the rules are 
simple. On lookup, s/<final sigma>/<normal sigma>/. On display, 
s/<normal sigma at end of label>/<final sigma>/. Other troublesome edge 
cases may not be so easy.

Gerv