New version of strawman for IDNAv2

[John C Klensin]

--On Friday, February 27, 2009 07:27 -0800 Mark Davis
<mark at macchiato.com> wrote:

>...
> With Indic scripts, the situation is slightly different. The
> rules limit the cases severely, disallowing joiners where they
> don't make a visual difference after almost all characters.
> However, taking the example of Malayalam, something like half
> of the cases where it allows joiners will not typically have a
> difference in visual display. With Tamil even fewer, with
> Sinhala, more.

FWIW, I was told early in this week that, with additional
precomposed characters added in Unicode 5.1, Malayalam doesn't
need joiners in IDNs at all.  The person who made the comment
more or less suggested that the proper solution to the issue
with joiners and the other Indic scripts was to add sufficient
additional characters to Unicode to capture the important
shaping forms (e.g., the half-characters), thereby also
eliminating the requirement.  He felt that was a better solution
generally because people who write the language understand about
half-characters but have never heard of ZWJ.

I did not encourage him to either make the relevant proposals or
to sit around waiting for this to happen (proposals or not).

However, to your specific point, Mark: do you suggest that the
fact that we cannot completely cover all cases implies that we
should give up and either abandon the joiners or leave this all
to the registries?

    john