Charter changes and a possible new direction

Simon Josefsson simon at josefsson.org
Tue Jan 13 21:05:01 CET 2009


Paul Hoffman <phoffman at imc.org> writes:

> Because of these two large categories of problems, I went back to the
> original design that Patrik and I came up with for updates. As an
> exercise, I looked at what it would take to update IDNA to incorporate
> Unicode 5.1, fix the bidi rules to handle the additional languages
> that we had inadvertently excluded, and allow both the old IDNA and
> the new to completely co-exist interoperably on the Internet.

I think we should seriously consider this approach.  I believe updating
IDNA like you propose will meet ~ 90 % of the problems that people
perceive with the existing IDNA standard.  Whether it is worth the
effort to complete IDNA2 for the remaining 10 % is not clear to me.

To be able to evaluate this fully, it would help to have a problem
statement that succinctly enumerates each problem identified with the
old IDNA standard.  I am aware of draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale-06.txt,
but as its title suggest, that document is more of a rationale for the
new design than a problem statement for the old design.  The
introduction section of draft-hoffman-idna2-00 is roughly what I'm
looking for, although it doesn't use the term "problem statement".

/Simon


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