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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