Final Sigma (was: RE: Esszett, Final Sigma, ZWJ and ZWNJ)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 01:17:47PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:

> Yes.  And what you didn't call out,

[…]

Oh, sure -- I can think of _lots_ of ways this is complicated by the
actual way the world is.  What you said, what Jaap said, the problem
of getting all the right metadata in the first round (does anyone
really think that once we open the "metadata for domain names" can,
the only worm that will pop out is IDNs?) -- it's just a bad idea if
we want to solve this problem quickly.

> Conversely, if one can contemplate that radical a chance to the
> DNS, then it is plausible to rethink the entire IDNA model and
> start thinking about a transition to a UTF-8-native model 

Right.  I seem to recall asking some time ago whether that's what we
need to start contemplating.  It sounded to me like the answer was,
"No."  But if we're not willing to bite off that much, then we need to
accept that we have to live with a bunch of limitations that are
inherent in DNS. 
 
> Anyone who is willing to accept the 10 year (minimum) that
> transition would take before we had stable IDNs should certainly
> advocate just such a solution.

I agree completely.

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