Punycode & IMA/EAI

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Wed May 21 22:06:21 CEST 2008


We've digressed from the point that I'm trying to make, which is that requiring lookup of unknown punycode names is not a solution for forward compatibility, unless you also have a successful way of getting that punycode from the actual Unicode.  The cases where punycode will solve problems isn't going to touch the usability, and as a sales rep or whatever I cannot use a Unicode name if it isn't usable to the people reading my card.

So my opinion is that either:

a) there shouldn't be a requirement to lookup unknown punycode to solve forward compatibility issues because it only helps a subset of the problem, or:

b) if there is such a requirement to lookup unknown punycode, then there must be a provision to also allow converting Unicode code points to punycode.  This isn't a problem if the Unicode is "normalized".  It could be a problem if the Unicode is in a case mapped form or other form that might not make the conversion straightforward.


- Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Tina Dam [mailto:tina.dam at icann.org]
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 12:57 PM
To: Martin Duerst; John C Klensin; Felix Sasaki; Shawn Steele
Cc: idna-update at alvestrand.no
Subject: RE: Punycode & IMA/EAI

I don't think I understand why this email-list/group is spending time discussing how popular or not popular IDNs are going to be....the matter of the fact is that IDNs exists at the second level under numerous TLDs, and there are processes underway aiming at making it available at the top level as well.

So, there really is no need to talk about "whether or not" or "how successful or useful" - the development on both technical and policy side are underway and as far as I believe that decision was made some time ago and is not up for debate today.

If you want to talk about usability or try things out, one good place to do that is on the IDN wiki: http://idn.icann.org

Tina




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