Re: Mississippi Hißes

[John C Klensin]

--On Tuesday, December 15, 2009 15:33 +0900 "\"Martin J.
Dürst\"" <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

> Hello John, others,
> 
> On 2009/12/14 5:43, John C Klensin wrote:
> 
>> It is a very big deal to convert or configure a registry to
>> work that way.  Personally, I have trouble believing that a
>> registry would want to do it for only one or two sets of
>> characters, especially so when just a few characters are
>> involved and there might be reasons for treating them as
>> separate (by contrast with Sharp-S and "ss", I can imagine no
>> circumstances in a Chinese context under which one would want
>> to treat a Simplified Chinese character and the corresponding
>> Traditional one as different).
> 
> It's not as easy as that. In many cases, there is more than
> one traditional Chinese character for a specific simplified
> one. In some cases, there is more than one simplified Chinese
> character corresponding to a specific traditional one.
>...

Oh, I know.  The sometime many-many relationship has been
pointed out many times, including on this list and including by
me.  My choice of words ("the corresponding...") and ordering
(Simplified to Traditional is easier than Traditional to
Simplified in non-country-linked cases because the latter needs
to be sure to convert Chinese without converting Japanese or
Korean) were intended to cover over the problem for the purposes
of things discussion.  I was obviously far too subtle.

As in my recent note to Eric, my point was really to illustrate
the difference between the German and Greek cases (one character
each and transitional) and the Chinese one (many characters and
a more or less permanent issue) in terms of motivation to do the
database, registrar-registry interface, and other work needed to
maintain longer-term multiple label bundling.

That doesn't make it more or less of a good idea.  Nor does it
address what incentives would be useful or what different zones
might actually decide to do.   Those are a rather separate
issues.  But it is one of the many operational realities that
create tradeoffs in this area; tradeoffs that I believe that
people should understand better before the WG starts trying to
write transition requirements or best practice documents about
how to handle "similar character" or "similar label" issues for
different meanings of "similar".

> And while there was Japanese participation in the efforts that
> led to the relevant RFC(s), .jp currently does treat each
> Kanji separately, without any kind of linkage between
> simplified and traditional forms whatsoever.

I believe the Korean practice is much like the Japanese one.
Put differently, of the various CJK ccTLD registries, the only
ones actually using long-term label variant bundling are some of
the Chinese registries (at least CNNIC and TWNIC; I haven't
looked into the others).  But those two represent a sufficient
number of actual registrations to suggest considerable
operational experience.

      john