The TRANSITIONAL proposal (was: The real issue: interopability, and a proposal)

Andrew Sullivan ajs at shinkuro.com
Tue Dec 1 19:15:48 CET 2009


On Tue, Dec 01, 2009 at 09:49:10AM -0800, Mark Davis ? wrote:
> When reading some of the transition proposals, one approach occurred to me.
> What if we have a new status for the 4 characters: TRANSITIONAL?

[…] 

> That will cause currently valid URLs to fail, but that is far better than
> having them have ambiguous targets. This way we get to the long-term goal of
> having these characters be PVALID, without having the disruption during the
> interim.

I like this distinction between "failure incompatibility" and
"ambiguous incompatibility": it strikes right at the heart of the
issue.

If the proposal were to go ahead (i.e. we were to add a TRANSITIONAL
status), then it solves a few problems:

    1.  The rest of the (less-controversial) changes can go ahead.

    2.  The problem is not "baked in" for all time (i.e. we signal now
    that a change will be coming).

    3.  We get some time perhaps to invent a way to deal with the
    transitional characters.

    4.  We get a new mechanism by which we can solve a future problem
    of this sort were one, heavent forfend, to show up.

So I think this could be a fruitful direction.  My only hesitation is
the possibility that we'd end up in exactly the same position in a few
years, because someone decided to do fancy client-based mapping in an
effort to produce backward compatibility with IDNA2003.  Would we have
the will at that point to say, "Too bad, we told them not to do that"?

A

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


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