Proposed Charter for the IDNAbis Working Group

[Paul Hoffman]

At 7:08 AM -0400 3/26/08, Vint Cerf wrote:
>The original Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) WG set the
>requirements for international characters in domain names in
>RFC3490, RFC3491 and RFC3492 in 2002 (published in 2003).
>These documents depend on RFC 3454 and were tied to Unicode
>version 3.2.  An update to the current version (5.x) is
>required to accommodate additional scripts.

Maybe change "current version" to "current Unicode version". 
Otherwise, it might seem you are talking about version of the IDNA 
protocol. However, this sentence doesn't capture one of the main 
features of proposed changes, which is that an update to *future* 
versions of Unicode is required to accommodate additional scripts. 
Therefore, I suggest changing "current version" to "current and 
future Unicode versions".

>   - Separate requirements for valid IDNs at registration time
>     (insertion of names into DNS zone files), vs. at resolution
>	time (looking up those names)

Editorial: s/, vs./from those/

>   - Review, and, as necessary revise, the algorithms and rules
>     for handling right to left character sequences in an IDN
>	context to allow labels based on additional scripts and
>	languages and to make presentation as predictable as
>	reasonably possible.

Editorial: s/right to left/right-to-left/
Editorial: s/languages/languages,/

>In
>particular, IDNs continue to use the "xn--" prefix and the same
>ASCII-compatible encoding, and the bidirectional algorithm
>follows the same basic design.

This is not true at all. The bidi algorithm in IDNA2003 was all about 
single labels standing on their own; the proposed changes in IDNA200x 
is about making full names present better. We can remove the last 
clause completely: it is already covered in the bulleted list earlier.

>    (iii) A change to the basic approach taken in the design
>    team documents (Namely: a protocol that is independent of Unicode
>    versions, that removes any character mapping in the
>    protocol, and that has improvements to the bidi algorithm).

Editorial: s/Namely:/namely,/