Esszett, Final Sigma, ZWJ and ZWNJ

Andrew Sullivan ajs at shinkuro.com
Mon Feb 23 17:05:53 CET 2009


On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 01:06:57PM +0100, Cary Karp wrote:

> Who said anything about multiple billing?  And, yet again, what makes
> that a protocol-level concern?

I agree that making specific bundling recommendations is way outside
our scope.  I do think, however, that a nearly-complete outline of how
to solve the problem that underpins Paul Hoffman's objection would do
an awful lot to address that objection.

With all respect to the Chair, I think that Paul has a credible point
that the charter can easily be read to restrict us from recommending
that (possibly a reduced set of) mappings end up in the protocol; and
also, to restrict bits on the wire change (e.g. "Ensure practical
stability of validity algorithms for IDNs."  I will note, however,
that I always had the impression that the Eszett and Final Form Sigma
changes were under consideration, and I'm not personally really
conviced by the "restrictive reading").  If that reading is correct,
then I don't think it matters whether the WG happens to agree that the
change is safe: it's still outside of charter, so the WG is not
allowed to adopt such a recommendation without warning the rest of the
IETF that's what we're going to do.  The way to make such a warning is
by charter change.

So, assuming we're not going to recharter, I think a detailed
explanation of how the change can be managed by registries would be
extremely helpful.  That is because, given a restrictive reading of
the charter, some people who are not following this WG may be very
surprised to learn that such an incompatible change is getting
included.  Those people might object very late in the process -- at
IETF last call or (worse) later.  I don't know about others, but my
experience is that the later this sort of big objection comes, the
worse it is for the documents.  I think it'd be nice to have something
in hand to answer such objectors, if they show up.  But I'm not, note,
volunteering to do the work (and I appreciate that that's a good
reason others might ignore this suggestion).

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.


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