Interoperability and updates
Paul Hoffman
phoffman at imc.org
Fri May 9 18:16:16 CEST 2008
At 8:40 AM -0700 5/9/08, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>We are only trying to maintain or achieve interoperability. If we
>cannot get the representatives of the bigger players to agree, then
>it's hard to achieve interoperability, right? Sorry if some of my
>wording is deemed arrogant -- I'm just an engineer with ideas for
>interoperability.
The IETF has a long history of wrestling with the question of
interoperability, agreement among the parties who care, enforcement,
resistance, and updates. Different people in the IETF (we are people,
not a monolithic organization) have different views about the best
way to write a standard to get the greatest interoperability. Some of
those differences of opinion are very relevant in the current
discussion.
My view for IDNAbis (and IDNA2003) is that if the standard does not
say that software that does a lookup needs to follow the rules for
allowed and disallowed characters, meaningful interoperability will
not be possible. Without lookup validation, registries will make
mistakes (or possibly intentional mistakes) and then leave them in
place with impunity. The reason we have had such good
interoperability in IDNA2003 is the fact that most/all major software
refuses to get to names that go against the standard.
This view makes updating the standard harder due to the
already-discussed issues of delay in software updates. However, those
issues are just as present if the standard does not require checking
for lookup but does require checking for display. Programs that
display IDNs need to be updated as often as those checking them
before sending out queries. Thus, the standard does not gain any
flexibility for updates unless both sides are made optional. A
standard that only proposed limits on what could be registered would
lead to near-zero interoperability due to the high number of mistakes
that would be made.
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