Changing DISALLOWED (was Re: Reserved general punctuation)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 05:58:53PM +0100, Debbie Garside wrote:

> leisure.  I just think that some sort of mechanism for updating according to
> "Mark's 3" should be incorporated unless we can realistically say that an
> RFC can be delivered within the timescales you specify - in which case I
> would be happy.

I'd like to hear the reason why anything under 6 months is really
important for the case I thought we were talking about, which is the
one where things move from DISALLOWED to PVALID (maybe with some
context rules).  

Remember, the reason the code point is DISALLOWED in the first place
is that it's supposed to be somehow harmful to or incompatible with
the DNS.  This doesn't mean it's not normally in a word, or anything
else -- it means "harmful to the DNS".  As John said several times in
Philadelphia, you can't write literature in the DNS.

Therefore, if we assume that "internationalized LDH" is what we're
aiming for, and something somehow makes it incorrectly onto the list
of "not-iLDH, therefore not allowed", I think taking a year or two to
change that is perfectly acceptable.  (If you don't actually like the
LDH-to-iLDH approach, that's a different matter.  That's an argument
that this WG needs to be rechartered instead.)

If taking a couple years to get such a change right is acceptable,
what is the purpose of designing option 3 now?  I grant John's
observation that it might turn out that we need such a mechanism,
because these cases are really common after all.  But surely it's
prudent to get some experience before inventing that mechanism?

A
-- 
Andrew Sullivan
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