IDNA Comparisons

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Gervase Markham wrote:
> On 16/07/09 13:28, Mark Davis ⌛ wrote:
>   
>> I put together a table that shows the assignments made by IDNA2008 and
>> IDNA2003, respectively. I would urge people to review these for problems
>> before Stockholm. For example, do we particularly want a hue and cry
>> from the blind community because the rules exclude Braille?
>>     
>
> Braille is, according to my limited understanding, a method for encoding 
> another character set in a form readable by people without sight. (The 
> version I know of encodes something pretty like ASCII, but perhaps in 
> other places in the world there are other versions encoding other 
> character sets.) I therefore can't see why one would want Braille domain

The prior line of text contains the funniest statement made in almost 10 
years of off-again, on-again work on the text-labels-in-ASCII problem.

>  names; surely one would create the domain names in the character set in 
> question, and convert that to Braille on output (e.g. using Braille TTY)?
>   

First, good catch Mark. I've been thinking about it since (wish I'd seen 
it first instead of fuming privately about Klingon or emoji).

Second, thinking that braille is "like" a character set, and may, 
without loss of utility, for the purposes of forming identifiers for 
resources, be replaced by the "likened" character set, may be incorrect.

Personal note, when my son was first diagnosed deaf at age 2, I had to 
confront the "deef culture" vs "cochlear implants" question, and I spent 
some time at the Maine School for the Deaf, and came to a conclusion 
that forms what I'm writing here -- ASL is a separate, gestural 
language. It is not a copy of English with some signed words and a 
signed alphabet for spelling out words for which the signers lack a 
signed word for. Signing exists within a larger social context of Deaf 
Cultures, and there are gestural encodings for which no simple 
association to oral encodings exist. The reverse is obvious. The 
gestural encoding for "did you hear that?" exists, but not with the same 
meaning as the oral encoding.

So, I don't assume that the users of a tactile encoding have no 
conventions, no personal associations, of information so encoded, which 
would not be lost if, for the purposes of forming identifiers for 
resources, that encoding was replaced by a "likened" visually encoding.

So then there is the question of whether tactile encodings, when 
represented visually, are "harmful", and if so, if any claim of harm, 
heat death of the universe perhaps, is sufficient to compel a 
handicapped population to submit to an additional handicap, even one not 
obvious except to those with that handicap. I'm still thinking about 
whether braille requires an internal encoding, as Gerv suggests, to 
ASCII (or other), upon display.

Eric

> Gerv
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