Stop me if I've misunderstood...

Paul Hoffman phoffman at imc.org
Thu Jul 9 16:47:13 CEST 2009


High-level: there is a difference between "misunderstood" and "haven't read the WG archives nor the WG charter". It's not like we haven't discussed each of these in detail before now.

At 11:54 AM +0100 7/9/09, Gervase Markham wrote:
>On 08/07/09 22:09, Mark Davis ? wrote:
> >    1. There are 4 characters that are valid in both IDNA2003 and
>>       IDNA2008, but will direct to to different IP addresses. So if you
>>       send a friend a URL, he could end up going to a different site, if
>>       you have different browsers or different browser versions.
>
>If it were just four characters, and there are only two possibilities
>for each, that could probably be coped with by registry bundling or
>similar techniques. So I don't see this as a show-stopper. It's just one
>of those things you get when you fix something which is broken. Stuff
>gets messy around the edges.

Exactly. Where there is current disagrement is where is the edge.

> >    2. There is a proposal to add a mapping to IDNAbis that would be "UI
>>       only", and optional. This is to handle user-expected variant
>>       differences: case, width,... That would also end up with problems
>>       with "bus-ability" in that whether a URL gets mapped is left up to
>>       the user-agent's choice, and what it thinks qualifies as "UI", and
>>       even whether the mapping is changed (the mapping is a SHOULD). And
>>       there is no current requirement that the mapping be compatible
>>       with IDNA2003, so we get the same problem as #1.
>
>Can someone summarize the problems there are with retaining exactly the
>same mapping algorithm which is used in IDNA2003? Is it not flexible
>enough to deal with new characters in Unicode 5.1 or something?

Please see the charter, then the (still-poorly-named) rationale document. There was rough consensus that not requiring mapping was a big enough improvement for the new protocol to make it the rule.

>If nothing else, the idea that the Mozilla project would need to develop
>such a mapping layer without any written guidance from a group which is
>supposed to contain a collection of expertise on language and the DNS
>seems to me to be perverse.

Please see draft-ietf-idnabis-mappings-01.txt, which is what we are currently discussing. It is the guidance that you seek.

>The browser manufacturers would, I can fairly confidently state, be very
>keen to make this interoperable.

The WG would be keen for the browser vendors to define what "interoperable" means here. Which two parties are interoperating?

>This leads me to ask the same question as above: what problems are there
>with this approach that I'm not seeing?

To start: the charter, which was widely discussed before it was adopted. Next: the long history of disagreement about what kind of mapping is "required" and what kind of mapping is "desirable". And then: what does conformance mean, as in, can a vendor make different mappings if they believe that the standard got it wrong for a particular set of users and/or in a particular operating environment.

The WG archives are long for a reason, unfortunately.


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