The Future of IDNA

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 07:22:47PM -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:

> It is not a silly question. You are asking many modern Greek
> registrants to feel the pain of bundling just because you want a few
> classical Greek registrants to be able to register names with/without
> tonos separately.

Stop, please, right there.  I am very strongly opposed to any
suggestion that this WG is in any way competent to evaluate the value
of the competing interests of different groups of users.  What you're
suggesting is that the people who are here and who have made a noise
(one with which I have some sympathy and which I certainly understand)
are more important than those from whom you haven't heard, so you're
going to cut off an option for the second group in the protocol to
make things easier for the first.  

> Under my proposal, the bundling would not be forever. It would
> strictly be a transition tactic. Display would be achieved via
> http://<domain-name>/idnproto.txt.

To the extent I understand your proposal, I think that "transition"
will last approximately until heat death of the universe or the end of
the DNS, whichever comes first.

> Who is talking about mapping for simplified and traditional Han?

Once you start picking linguistic winners in the IDNA name game, _you_
are.

> > As Andrew pointed out, you make life easier for some, but you
> > end up goring somebody else's ox.
> 
> Would you rather cause pain for modern Greek users than
> classical/polytonic Greek users?

I would rather cause some pain to one group of users so that the other
group can be accommodated _at all_, yes.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.