Mapping and the charter

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Fri Feb 20 06:53:02 CET 2009



--On Thursday, February 19, 2009 16:28 -0800 Paul Hoffman
<phoffman at imc.org> wrote:

> At 4:00 PM -0500 2/16/09, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> We may need to discuss whether some form of standardized
>> mapping is needed, possibly to maintain least surprise
>> for users accustomed to the behavior of non-IDNA
>> domain names (e.g. upper/lower case equivalence
>> for lookup purposes).
> 
> Having such discussion should be triggering a recharter for
> the WG. The last section of the charter is quite clear:
> 
>> The WG will stop work and recommend that a
>> new charter be generated if it concludes that any of the
>> following are necessary to meet its goals:
>> 
>> . . .
>>  (iii) A change to the basic approach taken in the design team
>> documents (Namely: independence from Unicode version and
>> elimination of character mapping in the protocol)

Paul,

I think it is quite clear too.  In particular, I believe that
the words "conclude that" mean that some recharter action would
be needed if we reached the conclusion that it was undesirable
to "eliminate character mapping from the protocol".   It seems
to me that you are interpreting "conclude" as prohibiting any
discussion of whether it is desirable to include or retain some
mappings.  Not only is that position inconsistent with my
understanding of the word "conclude", but it leads to a silly
state in which the WG can't have a sufficient discussion of
mappings to make a determination that they are needed (and
rechartering is required) but that one must recharter in order
to have enough of a discussion to determine whether mapping and
rechartering are needed.

The only point at which I see even a gray area is whether, if
the WG decided to retain a limited (and small) number of
mappings for backward-compatibility or other reasons, it would
constitute not "eliminating mappings from the protocol".   Some
large fraction of the intent of eliminating mappings would still
be satisfied if a few were retained and I can therefore read the
requirement either way.   I note that the one statement that
would unambiguously require that there be no mappings at all,
i.e., that the conversions between the native character form and
the ACE form of labels be fully reversible without any
information loss, does not appear in the charter.

I also read some other charter provisions differently that you
apparently do.   In particular:

(1) "The constraints of the original IDN WG still apply to
IDNABIS, namely to avoid disturbing the current use and
operation of the domain name system, and for the DNS to continue
to allow any system to resolve any domain name in a consistent
way."  

That sentence is about the DNS and what is placed in it and
resolved, not about any native-character formats.  "Resolving
_any domain name_ in a consistent way" has to do with resolving
the ACE forms stored in the DNS, and their resolution is
consistent and unchanged by the IDNA2008 proposals.   The
relationship between a domain name (the ACE) and how it is
interpreted may be changed (although much less in that direction
than the other one), but that is about the behavior of IDNA, not
that of the DNS.

(2) I also note that the charter says, quite explicitly:

"Subject to the more general constraints described above, the WG
is permitted to consider changes that are not strictly
backwards-compatible.  For any such change that is recommended,
it is expected to document the reasons for the change, the
characters affected, and possible transition strategies."

To the extent to which the Chair determines that the Final Sigma
case, the Eszett case, and the treatment of  ZWJ and ZWNJ as
characters (rather than discarding them) represent WG consensus,
that above appears to me to make a demand for rechartering a
non-issue.  One could reasonable debate whether the reasons for
the change and the transition strategies have been adequately
documented, but the fact of making the decisions to make changes
in that are is explicitly within-charter.

regards,
    john


YMMD and probably does.

best,
   john



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