local mappings

[Erik van der Poel]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 6:03 AM, John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com> wrote:
> --On Monday, January 26, 2009 8:50 AM -0500 Andrew Sullivan <ajs at shinkuro.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 05:36:42PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
>>> the unsophisticated)?    If we do lower-case, but continue to
>>> ban compatibility characters and the other odd cases that
>>> surprise those who don't know what is going on, does that
>>> help us significantly with the compatibility and astonishment
>>> situations that are really important?

Astonishment is in the eye of the beholder. For example, English
speakers may be astonished to discover even the existence of the
full-width Latin letters in Unicode, while Japanese speakers may be
astonished if full-width Latin letters are not automatically converted
to normal-width ones (i.e. NFKC).

>> That sounds to me like a good way forward, assuming that what
>> we say as a result is something other than the current "local
>> mappings that make sense" language.  That current language is
>> laudable in intention but almost certainly a recipe for
>> disaster in a protocol.
>
> My unspoken assumption was that we would either completely
> remove the "local mapping" text or that we would figure out how
> to limit it to truly exceptional and unusual cases, such the
> the dotless "i" situation.   Ken's note contains some hints
> about how that might be done, but the WG would need to sort
> that out.

Before we go to IETF Last Call, it seems to me that we should at least
achieve rough consensus within the WG whether global mappings
(lower-casing, NFKC, possibly others) will be part of IDNA200X or not.

Erik