M-label definition

[Lisa Dusseault]

Well here's a start for our set of options: on re-reading part of the
protocol draft carefully today, it appears there's one suggestion in
there that some might call mapping, although the protocol draft calls
it "processing" or "converting" in section 5.3:

   The Unicode string MAY then be processed to prevent confounding of
   user expectations.  For instance, it might be reasonable, at this
   step, to convert all upper case characters to lower case, if this
   makes sense in the user's environment, but even this should be
   approached with caution due to some edge cases: in the long term, it
   is probably better for users to understand IDNs strictly in lower-
   case, U-label, form.  More generally, preprocessing may be useful to
   smooth the transition from IDNA2003, especially for direct user
   input, but with similar cautions.

This is fairly concrete, although I didn't see a recommendation for
what should be displayed. E.g. if a user enters an upper-case string
and the preprocessing lower-cases it, should the user input be
transformed in the user interface, before or after lookup or both?
If we're going to talk at all about "better for users to understand
IDNs in lowercase form", we probably need to be more specific.

This is not incompatible at all with a separate spec that recommends a
consistent preprocessing algorithm suitable for global use.

Lisa

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 2:52 PM, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:
> eric, et al,
>
> yes, we do need to have a concise set of options to consider. I will
> be happy to catalog the ones I think I know about for comment.
>
> v
>
>
> Vint Cerf
> Google
> 1818 Library Street, Suite 400
> Reston, VA 20190
> 202-370-5637
> vint at google.com
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 8, 2009, at 5:17 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
>
>> Paul Hoffman wrote:
>>> ...
>>> It may be a good time for some to start listing the proposals
>>
>> Over the lifetime of -bis several contributors have suggested mapping
>> something, and I recall at least one garnering a "there is no
>> mapping in
>> this [2008] protocol" response.
>>
>> I'm not suggesting a mind-numbing grovel through the -bis mailing list
>> archive, but the prior tentative proposals that anyone does recall
>> could
>> be checked for reasonableness on look-up. Its not so much the change
>> that is in the front of our minds, its the changes we dismissed and
>> managed to dismiss the memory of as well that could be checked.
>>
>> Eric
>>
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