Eszett

[Shawn Steele]

I shudder at bringing this up, but it’s come up a few times in different threads and different contexts recently.  (Yes, some by me, others not).  I believe that the current plan of changing the IDNA2003 eszett behavior is a bad idea.  Even worse, I believe the drafts have arrived at this position as an accident of the evolution of the process and not well-reasoned behavior.

My understanding of the situation (I’m going to oversummerize, and no, I’m not going to go re-read all the eszett archives, I only have a week before vacation ☺)


·         The working group decided that mappings were bad (this thread is eszett, not mappings).

·         Germany realized that with no mappings they’d have an orphaned letter, eszett, and they really want to be able to type fußball at the UI level.

·         The working group agreed that interfering with fußball was unhealthy and so eszett ß was added.

·         A tremendous amount of discussion reintroduced mappings.

·         German feedback indicated that mappings were solved the eszett case.

·         The eszett continues to remain a breaking change from IDNA2003.

There are some words in German (like fußball) that SHOULD be spelled with an eszett.  There are even a few words that become homographs if the eszett isn’t used.  It should also be pointed out that in other German speaking locales, the ss is preferred, and even in Germany it is used as an alternate spelling in some contexts.  SS or ss is often used instead of ß for stylistic reasons if nothing else.

I believe that the logic used to add eszett was sound at the time since mappings were prohibited, however with the reemergence of mapping that logic is no longer sound, nor is it even the request of the group that made the initial suggestion.

Additionally there are some problems with eszett being distinct in a mapping environment.  It is 99% linguistically equivalent to ss (or SS), and “anyone” who registered an ß domain would probably also register the ss version.  Certainly at the moment IDN still doesn’t have 100% adoption, so the ss form is more common in a domain name.

As I mentioned I don’t think the original request for the eszett is still valid in the current context, and I believe it was withdrawn.

Lastly, it’d be an unnecessary breaking change, and really bad for fußball.de to go somewhere other than fussball.de.  You’ll even note that fussball.de uses the brand with ss (granted, likely initially because of ASCII limitations), despite being a .de domain.

Please revert the eszett behavior.

Thanks,

- Shawn

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http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste

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