Esszett, Final Sigma, ZWJ and ZWNJ

[Martin Duerst]

At 06:28 09/02/22, Tina Dam wrote:
>On February 21, 2009 1:02 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:

>> For registries that formerly mapped Esszett or Final Sigma, the
>> solutions are:
>> 
>> 1. block registration of Esszett and Final Sigma at the registry level
>> (in which case any former registration forms are still valid but will
>> not be found by entering the newly PVALID characters)
>> 
>> 2. Bundle Esszett with "ss" and Final Sigma with lower case ("sigma")
>> (and do so retrospectively for all prior registrations of the mapped
>> forms).
>
>I don't think bundling the two sigma's is a good solution. One is used in 
>the middle of a word and the other at the end of a word. Not only are the 
>two characters used differently they also look completely different. So 
>while it's a registry decision on how to deal with this I don't think this 
>group should make that bundling recommendation.

Bundling may not necessarily be the right thing to do, but one of the
options. But it may help smoothing out casing issues, especially for
the final case (uppercase 'normal' sigma gets downcased to lowercase
normal sigma). Other options may include the prohibition of final sigmas
in the middle of a word or the prohibition of normal sigmas at the end of
a word, if that's linguistically appropriate. (A Greek aquaintance of mine
told me that there are cases where a final sigma appears in the middle
of a word to indicate that there is a composite word, or some such.)

>But it strikes me there is a different solution. Open up for allowing the 
>new characters for registration in a sunrise fashion, where existing 
>registrants (in whatever workaround solution was applied previously for 
>accommodating strings that otherwise would have contain either Esszett, 
>Final Sigma, or ZWJ or ZWNJ) to pre-register using these new chars in 
>replacement or addition to their current domain name registration.

That's of course possible. But that basically means asking to pay again
for something that the registrant thought they already had as part of
their registration.

Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp