Additional thoughts on TRANSITIONAL

[Erik van der Poel]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 8:25 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at shinkuro.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 04:11:47AM -0800, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>>
>> There is no new value called TRANSITIONAL. The infamous 4 characters
>> (above) start with the value DISALLOWED. Later, we change them to
>> PVALID (or CONTEXTJ for 200C/200D). We encourage ICANN to redelegate
>> TLDs the registries of which flout our rules.
>
> Don't you just run into a similar transition problem in the other
> direction, using this mechanism?

I'm not sure what you mean by "the other direction", but it is true
that this approach involves two transitions if the clients do not
automatically update their tables. I.e. we would first have to wait
for new IDNAbis clients to spread, then, after changing the 4
characters to PVALID/CONTEXTJ, we would have to wait again.

> Besides, I seem to recall discussion in this WG some time ago that
> said basically, "If things move from DISALLOWED to PVALID, it will be
> a Very Big Deal."  This approach actually builds that in from day 1.
> I suspect that, if these start with DISALLOWED, they'll remain there
> forever, and those desiring the characters will be SOL.

Well, then maybe it would be better to have a separate value called
TRANSITIONAL, but registries must not register labels with
TRANSITIONAL characters, and clients must not map them nor look them
up. How does that sound?

Erik