Eszett

[Shawn Steele]

I'm definitatly an individual now :)

> What do you mean by 99% linguistically equivalent? In the new German
> orthography, the difference between ß and ss is a very clear phonetic
> difference (long preceeding vowel for ß, short preceeding vowel for
> ss).

I agree completely that eszett is a letter and that the "new orthography" give clear and concise rules for when ss and ß are supposed to be used in German, in Germany since 1996.

In practice, how is fussball.de pronounced?  Of course that site likely picked ss instead of the correct spelling because ASCII didn't allow eszett.  I think most Germans would recognize ss instead of ß as a widely recognized alternate spelling of words using eszett.

IDN is attempting to support International domain names, hopefully consistently.

* Eszett has a long history of alternately being spelled with ss.  You even used to see "strasse" on some German street signs (yes, spelling reform has caused signs to be reprinted)

* What happens to a business with a pre-1996 spelling of its name?

* The IDN standard is, I believe, International.  A swiss user can type fussball.com and a german user type fußball.com.  Are we really taking the stand that the same word, in the same language, should go to a different place just because someone might confuse masse with maße?  We never promised all words would be registered.  I can't register "shift.com" for garmets, "shift.com" for a worker's overtime rights group, and "shift.com" for a moving organization.

* Assuming that I want a german domain name, am I truely going to limit myself to the ß spelling?  I cannot imagine, whether I was masse.de or maße.de, not registering both names.  If nothing else, I may have swiss customers.

* If everyone is going to "bundle" the names anyway, then why break 2003 just to force them to bundle.  Sure, the registrars may not prebundle the names, but as a user I certainly would.

* What happens to the existing ss names that should be spelled ß?  What happens when someone else beats fussball.de to fußball.de?  Are we going to force the registrars to pre-bundle or block those URLs?

Some of those points must be new points, or at least ignored points.  If nothing else the last question "how do we expect existing fußball mappings to be migrated" hasn't been answered that I'm aware of.

The goal of name services is to provide a pointer to a server.  IDNA2003 already allows that with ß.  Maße.de goes to a server.  It is nearly irrelevent that masse.de also goes to the same server since AAA.com for the auto club and AAA.com for my local plumbers also would go to the same server.  Same with "shift" or any English homograph.  It cannot possibly be a requirement that everyone get their perfect name.

Assuming that ß were allowed and someone wants to register "Maße.de", what would happen if it were already taken?  Worst case they'd say "bummer, I need a different name" and try again with something else.  Is that so bad?  It happens thousands of times a day in ASCII.  At this point it is pretty irrelevent whether they were blocked by masse.de or an existing maße.de.

The only problem I see with ß and IDNA2003 is that if I do a reverse DNS lookup on the name, then I end up with the non-standard (unless I'm swiss) spelling.  Still common enough that users can easily read it, but non-standard enough that spelling teachers would likely frown.  I am not at all sure that solving that reverse lookup/display problem is worth breaking IDNA2003 and confusing Swiss-German / German-German interoperability.

IDNA2003 "freaked out" with a minor bug in the Unicode normalization standard that caused a minor ambiguacy in character sequences that weren't even linguistically possible, in any language.  The response was to get Unicode to create Corrigendum #5 for UAX#15 because the breaking behavior was intolerable.  Yet breaking the behavior of IDNA2003 for an existing sequence that is commonly used (fußball.de) and valuable, at least to some users, is acceptable?

So, specific, new questions:
* Do we believe that users (or registrars) are NOT going to bundle these names anyway when getting new names?
* How is migration going to happen for users like fussball.de?
* Do we feel that there are going to be no Swiss-German/German-German interoperability issues because of this change?

-Shawn

Note: There was a question regarding ss and ß in comparisons.  Both Google and bing seem to return results for either spelling.  (I think the compare equal there, or else I was just getting lucky and keywords are added in both forms).