Proposed Charter for the IDNAbis Working Group

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Thu Mar 27 20:39:44 CET 2008


Vint,

One small clarification...

--On Thursday, 27 March, 2008 15:24 -0400 Vint Cerf
<vint at google.com> wrote:

>... 
> Without trying to be complete, the rough outline of the
> difference between the 200X and 2003 philosophy as I
> understand it is  as follows:
 
> 3. An effort has been made to deal further with bi-directional
> scripts and with special symbols such as zero length
> joiner/non-joiners. It appears that the latter may be
> contextually dependent, needed in some languages but not in
> others that might share overlapping use of a script. So there
> are contextual rules available in the specification toolkit
> for these contingencies

While they may interact (with some uses of Arabic script in
particular), the bi-directional and joiner issues are separate,
with some critical applications for the latter being associated
with some Indic scripts that are written left-to-right.  The
contextual problem with them applies primarily to scripts with
which those characters are never used (such as, to take a handy
example, Latin-derived ones) because they would be invisible
characters in that context.  But, again, these are details, not
"basic", at least IMO.

    john



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