Stop me if I've misunderstood...

[Andrew Sullivan]

Mark (and others, for that matter),

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 02:09:18PM -0700, Mark Davis ⌛ wrote:

> This is a rather bad situation -- for interoperability and security, let
> alone the user experience -- but that people in this group just don't
> realize it yet because they haven't gotten enough feedback from people who
> are concerned with interoperability and security. 
[…]

The idnabis work started with the assumption that mapping in the
protocol was bad; that principle is in the charter.

It seems to me that offering some guidelines for thinking about what
to do with characters that are, in the context, obviously similar (but
which might not always be similar all the time, in every context) is a
reasonable thing to do.  But there doesn't seem to be any way to turn
that reasonable context-dependent thing into a universally-quantified
rule: if there were, there would be no controversy about the decisions
made for IDNA2003.  I am prepared to be wrong about this feeling, but
that's how it seems to me today.

So, do you think that (1) the original assumption was wrong or (2)
that this attempt to provide some "considerations for mapping" is
wrong?  I know you posted the other day on this topic, and argued that
things were bad, but I didn't understand the upshot.  This is
undoubtedly because I'm not always as sharp as I'd like, but I think
both (1) and (2) are possible interpretations of your position and I'm
trying to understand which it is.

Best regards,

A

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