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

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

On 31-Oct-08, at 8:51 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
>
> that train has long since left the station. Since the 11K syllables
> are sufficient (burden of proof on those who believe otherwise) they
> and they alone should be permitted in Korean IDN.

I believe I understand the example in this case, and I believe I  
understand the KATS statement as well.  But none of these appear to me  
to have answered the fundamental question I had before, which is why  
these exceptions should be in the _protocol_.  They sound to me like  
policy.

Even if only the 11k syllables "alone should be permitted in Korean  
IDN", it does not follow that any of the codepoints that are the  
subject of this discssion should be excluded at the protocol level.

I am particularly uneasy with arguments that depend either on  
confusability or on the way that one could have encoded these  
characters in Unicode, if one ran the circus.  This working group  
explicitly ruled the first of those premises out in its charter.  The  
working group's dependence on properties explicitly requires that we  
accept the Unicode definitions.  Even if we think things should be  
another way, we're not here to specify The Right Way to encode the  
writing system of a language.  We're here to "internationalize LDH".

That one can do nasty and unpleasant things with "iLDH" is plain.  One  
can also do such nasty things with plain LDH, although not as many.   
This is why operators of zones need to have clear policies for their  
zones, and why (in my opinion) we ought to be encouraging a default of  
"disallow".

What I believe we should _not_ do is try selectively to include policy  
in the protocol.  For the most part, I believe the current documents  
have done a good job in that direction.  I believe that if we begin  
now to DISALLOW characters on the grounds of confusability or likely  
utility, we're confusing protocol and policy.  I think if we're going  
to do that, we should look again at the foundation principles of the  
current work, and perhaps revisit some decisions that I, at least, had  
hoped were closed.

Best regards,

Andrew

--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com