Proposed Charter for the IDNAbis Working Group

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Thu Mar 27 20:43:21 CET 2008


> Personal opinion only, but this is more or less the boundary
> point between "discuss charter and what this is about" and "need
> to read the drafts before discussing them."

Reasonable point.  I'd've probably expected the charter to guide the drafts rather than the other way around though.  Since I haven't been involved in this process before, perhaps I misunderstand what the charter's for.

Dropping a few code points and breaking back-compat is a lot different than dropping all of the symbols.  My understanding of the draft is that we intend to drop all of the symbols, so I'd expect that to be clearly allowed by the charter.  My interpretation of the charter was that "breaking" changes would be small in scope and limited to reduce their impact.

I'm not trying to argue about dropping symbols, I don't think they cause much harm, but also don't see how they're very useful, so I don't mind if they're in or out.  I do think that removing that many code points does break IDNA2003 (whether or not they were practical) and so the charter should allow this "big" of a change.  It wasn't clear to me if the charter was intended to reduce the scope of the drafted symbols behavior, or if it was allowed.

I still don't know how to interpret the "(a charter change is required) to remove any character mapping".  I understand now that doesn't mean the set of allowed characters, but if mappings between are being moved to "outside the protocol", then it seems like all of the mappings are being removed from the core proposals.

- Shawn



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