IDNABIS Status post-IETF 75

[Vint Cerf]

Ladies and Gentlemen of the IDNABIS Working Group:

We are rapidly nearing the conclusion of our work and do not  
anticipate more than one additional round of technical and editorial  
changes to the documents, to be made during the next few weeks.

The current versions are as shown below:

"Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Background,  
Explanation, and Rationale", John Klensin, 18-Jun-09,
<draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale-10.txt>

"Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA): Protocol",  
John Klensin, 13-Jul-09, <draft-ietf-idnabis-protocol-13.txt>

"Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Definitions  
and Document Framework", John Klensin, 22-Jun-09,
<draft-ietf-idnabis-defs-09.txt>

"An updated IDNA criterion for right-to-left scripts", H. Alvestrand,  
C. Karp, 30-Nov-2008
< draft-ietf-idnabis-bidi-03.txt>

"The Unicode code points and IDNA", Patrik Faltstrom, 22- 
Dec-2008,<draft-ietf-idnabis-tables-05.txt>

  "Mapping Characters in IDNA", Pete Resnick, Paul Hoffman, 3-Jul-09,   
<draft-ietf-idnabis-mappings-01.txt>

The editors are incorporating changes that were agreed by participants  
during the IETF 75 working group meeting in Stockholm this week.  I  
would urge working group members to reflect on any remaining issues of  
substance and to make known any further editorial comments for the  
editors. There were open questions of technical substance raised  
during the working group meeting and these are being researched by the  
appropriate editor(s). Please make all comments to the IDNA-UPDATE  
list so these matters will be visible to all participants.

The editors have committed to revising their documents by August 10,  
so please get any substantive or editorial points onto the working  
group list by that time. Once the documents are issued on August 10,  
there will be a further period of two weeks (until August 24) for the  
Working Group Last Call.

By way of this message, I am asking Lisa Dusseault, the Area Director,  
to outline the procedures for Working Group Last Call. Once these  
procedures are complete, I plan to submit the finalized documents to  
the Area Director along with a brief cover letter outlining our work  
for presentation to the IESG. The IESG will either authorize the  
documents to enter IETF Last Call or return them to the Area Director  
(and implicitly to me as working group chair) for revision.

It is important to recognize that while we have reached an important  
milestone in the IDNA work, it is predictable that there will be new  
matters arising as experience is gained with the new standards. If  
they are of sufficient substance this may require the authorization  
and creation of a new working group. In the meantime, however, other  
working groups and organizations (notably ICANN) are eager to have the  
benefit of finalized IDNA2008 documents so they can apply them to the  
new TLD process it is developing and to service demands for lower  
level non-ASCII domain names.

Many people have contributed to this effort so far and I thank each  
and every one of you for your voluntary work on this very challenging  
problem. I think we owe a great deal especially to our editors: John  
Klensin, Harald Alvestrand, Patrik Faltstrom, Pete Resnick and Paul  
Hoffman.



Vint Cerf