Follow-up to Monday's discussion of digits

Andrew Sullivan ajs at shinkuro.com
Wed Nov 19 23:51:48 CET 2008


On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 01:57:20PM +0900, Martin Duerst wrote:
> I do see nothing in the current documents (nor in IDNA2003, for
> that matter) that would forbid registries to have a policy to
> restrict registrations in a single label to any one series
> of digits, or to some desirable (and hopefully non-confusable
> and therefore non-exploding) combination of series of digits.

I agree with this, and think that the restriction _could_ be done only
by regstries.  That said, the example case may be unusual enough that
it is worth pushing into the protocol.  

I'll probably get the terminology wrong in what follows, but I my
current understanding is that the various ranges of digits always
contain the complete set of digits, even if the digits are really
shared.  In other words I think that the extended and non-extended
Arabic-Indic ranges in some sense contain three characters that would
have been the same code point had they not been digits.  It's a good
thing that the code points for digits are always in a contiguous
range, but it has created this unusual case that happens to be bad for
domain name label use.  Is that correct?  Because if I understand this
correctly, it's sufficiently unlike other cases that treating it
specially in the protocol might be the right trade-off.  This "strange
case", after all, is part of what was the motivation behind having
context rules in the first place, no?

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.


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