sharp s PVALID2016

Georg Ochsner g.ochsner at revolistic.com
Thu Dec 3 13:40:03 CET 2009


Hello,

I think Mark's TRANSITIONAL idea is quite interesting. But because I see how
difficult it would be to form another WG and standard in a couple of years
in order to make the change to PVALID I would adopt it a little bit.

The idea would be to do the following:

- Latin small letter sharp S gets PVALID2016
PVALID2016 means it is a forbidden character until 2016 and should be
treated as PVALID by applications distributed or updated from 2016 onwards.
All TLD registries are requested to not allow the ß for registration before
2016.

- Mappings from ß to ss are not allowed anymore from now onwards


This would still leave some choice open to application providers and
registries how to implement the ß after 2015. The advantage though would be,
that it is not necessary to form another WG in order to update IDNA2008.

- Additionally we can recommend TLD registries to open a grandfathering
period for the first registrations of domains with ß, so that registrants of
domains with ss can be preferred to get the sibling with ß.


I think this is a reasonable plan and timeframe. If someone is using old
applications too long, I think it's his own responsibility. Every software
can only be supported by the manufacturer for a limited time. There are many
products still in use where there are no security updates available
anymore.. but it's not always the manufactures fault. A responsibility the
WG and manufactures have is to 1. make the information about changes
accessible and 2. give enough time to react (update).

I don't know the planed lifecycles of the browsers and mail clients, so 2016
is only a suggestion.

Best regards
Georg



More information about the Idna-update mailing list