KATS (Korean Agency for Technology and Standards)'s Comments on theUnicode Codepoints and IDNA Internet-Draft

[Martin Duerst]

Dear Mr. Kim,

Many thanks for this document. It is very helpful in that it contains
some new arguments re. Hangul Jamos. What it essentially says is that
some historically used Hangul letters look too similar to different
modern letters to be distinguished by the modern user.

To give one equivalent for Latin, this is as if there were, historically,
two versions of E, one with a shorter middle bar, and another with
a middle bar of the same length as the top or bottom bar. A modern
reader wouldn't distingush between the two because s/he wouldn't
(at least not actively) remember the existence of the historic
difference.

 From that line of argument, it looks like a good idea to disallow
Hangul Jamos altogether. However, I'm not really that sure about it.
There are ample possibilities for spoofing inside a single script
even with modern letters. My favorite example is German and Hungarian
Umlauts. German uses a/o/u with two little dots or strokes above
(the official name is DIAERESIS). Hungarian uses the later two as
well as o/u with DOUBLE ACCENT. My guess is that a large percentage
of German readers wouldn't identify an o/u with double accent as
being different from an o/u with umlaut. Of course, we still
cannot prohibit o/u with double accent, because otherwise we
are excluding some part of Hungarian.

So this means I'm not completely sure yet whether we should
exclude Hangul Jamos at the protocol level.

Regards,    Martin.

At 18:53 08/10/31, Jaeyoun Kim wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>On behalf of Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (Ministry of
>Knowledge Economy) and National Internet Development Agency of Korea
>(NIDA), I would like to submit this comment on the Unicode Codepoints
>and IDNA Internet-Draft (draft-ietf-idnabis-tables-02.txt).
>
>Please find the attached comment.
>
>Regards,
>Jaeyoun Kim
>National Internet Development Agency of Korea (NIDA)
>
>Content-Type: application/pdf;name="2008-10-31 - KATS Comments on the 
>Unicode Codepoints and IDNA Internet-Draft.pdf"
>X-Attachment-Id: f_fmyncdb00
>Content-Disposition: attachment;filename="2008-10-31 - KATS Comments on the 
>Unicode Codepoints and IDNA Internet-Draft.pdf"
>
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#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp