Casefolding Sigma (was: Re: IDNAbis Preprocessing Draft)

[Michel Suignard]

> From: John C Klensin [mailto:klensin at jck.com]
>> From Michel Suignard
>> Except for the Cyprus case, it is my understanding that the
>> work as currently proposed in the new IDN200x would fix
>> these issues.
>..
> It does and it doesn't.  First, among the various proposals,
> yours is probably the most plausible from a technical
> standpoint.  It may be among the least plausible from a
> political one because countries really don't like being told
> what to call themselves.  Some are, of course, more vocal on
> that point than others and some are happier with the 3166-1
> names (which are sometimes not very good translations to either
> English or French of what they are called in their own
> languages) than others.

(Didn't quote the rest because I am pretty much in agreement with it)

John

I still want to clarify what I did. I looked at various sources, including cultural elements already exposed by operating systems (that includes Windows Vista), but also other similar sources such as ICU, and then embassy, consulate sites, government, and general purpose web sites about country names. It is in general pretty easy to get the official name(s) of a country as displayed in a picture. It is a bit more complicated to create an authoritative encoding, and obviously determining which variant would be appropriate for an IDN TLD is even more touchy (official names tend to be too long as they typically include the type of government such as republic, kingdom,.. with some adjectives). I have never dared to consider my input as a final proposal but instead as a first step to determine these names. Owners of these countries and territorial entities (cc are not all countries by far) have obviously the final say. For the 2-letter Latin acronym, we were lucky to have 3166-1. Unfortunately for IDN TLDs, there are no official repository on which we can rely. If ISO embarks on such an effort it will take many years, more than what most tld owners are willing to wait. My work is just an honest input to speed up the process somehow. As far as finding a friendly repository for these abbreviated names (once cctld owners have made their decision), I always thought that CLDR could be as good as anything else and could be achieved quickly. Finally I made those points at an adhoc session concerning idn cctld that was held at the last IGF in Rio and chaired by Chris Disspain (.au NIC), I hope it was useful.

Sorry to be slightly out of scope, but this relates to IDN, and obviously we better make sure that IDN200x allows a fair representation of these IDN TLD names.

Best regards,

Michel
Based on feedback I will post my document in the next few days (I need to do some updates)