Stop me if I've misunderstood...

[Gervase Markham]

On 09/07/09 15:47, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> 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.

I'm sure you have. But, as I summarised for someone else late last night:

 From my point of view, in brief, here's how it looked: big phishing 
problem, group created to solve much of the issue at a protocol level, 
was looking good, banning lots of unnecessary characters etc., and also 
doing good stuff updating to the latest version of Unicode... and then 
loads of messages start flying backwards and forwards, the volume gets 
too much and when the dust settles, what seems to be important parts of 
IDNA2003 are on the floor in pieces, with people saying "but we _never_ 
even considered keeping _those_ bits... where have you been?"

> Please see the charter, then the (still-poorly-named) rationale
> document.

I agree with everything in the charter, except (it would now seem) the 
second half of the very last sentence in point iii). Nothing there 
explains to me why removing the MUST status of normalizations and 
mappings is necessary, or even desirable. There are lots of laudable 
goals there; some may claim that this removal is necessary to reach 
them, but the charter does not demonstrate this.

Having reviewed the rationale document, it appears that there may be 
some level of talking past each other here; if so, I apologise. It says:

"Case-matching must be done, if desired, by IDN clients even though it 
wasn't done by ASCII- only DNS clients.  That situation was recognized 
in IDNA2003 and nothing in these specifications fundamentally changes it 
or could do so. In IDNA2003, all characters are case-folded and mapped 
by clients in a standardized step."

Is this saying that case-folding and normalization remains (in 
overwhelming part) in IDNA2008 just as in IDNA2003? If so, I am most 
encouraged. That was not the impression I got from recent mailing list 
traffic. But it does raise the question about what exactly is being 
removed, if not this? I am suddenly further confused.

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

So what was a MUST part of the protocol is now just advisory? Who, if 
anyone, plans to take advantage of this change in status to ignore the 
advice?

>> 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?

I had a go at defining this more precisely, but then I saw Shawn's 
excellent message.

> 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".

Is anyone arguing for the undesirability under some or any circumstances 
of case folding (which is the current overwhelming user expectation) and 
normalization?

> 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.

Define "can". Saying "a vendor may choose to do something different" is 
no argument not to have a standard.

Gerv