consensus Call: TATWEEL

JFC Morfin jefsey at jefsey.com
Thu Mar 26 22:30:51 CET 2009


Vint,
My response is a _double_ NO.

- NO to the legitmacy of the question itself.
- NO to the DISALLOW for pure technical reasons.

since you want this to be explicit and you are yourself explicit on 
the reason of the consensus of this WG:

At 12:54 26/03/2009, Vint Cerf wrote:
>Alireza,
>I am pretty sure that the IDNABIS WG does not think that all visual
>confusion problems can be solved at the protocol level.

This makes the call for consensus outside of the WG scope as the 
Charter says: "There are a variety of generally unsolvable problems, 
notably the problem of characters that are confusingly similar in 
appearance (often known as the "phishing" problem) that are not 
specifically part of the scope of the WG".

>However, it  has taken the decision that characters identified as 
>symbols not used in written language should be excluded, for instance.

I am not aware of a such a decision. I am not aware that TATWEEL is 
not used in written language (I do not even read Arabic). I do not 
see this is the charter which speaks of the support of the use of 
"characters other than Latin A(a)-Z(z), digits 0-9 and the hyphen ("-")"

>The IDNA2008
>stance so far has been to eliminate characters that do not appear to
>serve a useful purpose in the formation of domain names (a restricted
>class of "writing").

The charters says: "It is recognized that some explicit exceptions 
may be necessary in any case, but attempts will be made to minimize 
these exceptions."

>As nearly as I can tell, Tatweel provokes a
>fairly strong, if rough, consensus that it serves no useful purpose
>for domain names and should be disallowed.

That question is meaningless. (1) There cannot be a rough consensus 
that it serves no useful purpose for domain names since only Arabic 
script users can say it. (2) And even if there could be a real 
informed consensus on that, this would have no impact what so ever on 
IDNA2008 due to the charter of which I just quoted. This is an 
exception among many others the members of this WG are just not aware 
of, in many other languages (for example what about French half and 
quarter spaces?). Our duty is to attempt to permit users to address 
TATWEEL like cases on a general basis.

I have no objection if people in this WG wants to revisit the charter 
and start working on IDNA2010, but please, let first complete and 
publish IDNA2008.

>There is still a great deal of dependence on the discretion of
>registries (in the general sense of the word, at all levels of domain
>name labels) for protective restrictions on the use of some (many?)
>allowed characters.

The point is not to further restrict. The point is to support the 
"characters other than Latin A(a)-Z(z), digits 0-9 and the hyphen 
("-"), with the provision that if some explicit exceptions may be 
necessary in any case, [] attempts will be made to minimize these exceptions."

If a registry wants to support TATWEEL it MUST be able to do it. 
Hence my NO to DISALLOW.
If a registry does not want to support TATWEEL, it also MUST be able to do so.

>I think the sense of the working group is that
>protocol level prohibition serves the interests of Internet's domain
>name users where the ban has consensus which we would appear to have
>here, possibly with a few dissenting views, yours among them it would
>seem.

It is your priviledge to confirm such a sense of the working group as 
a rough consensus about its linguistic authority; that it does not 
violate its Charter, nor fails RFC 3935 criteria when disallowing 
TATWEEL at protocol level. In such a case, I think it would be 
necessary to explain the rationale of all this when entering the text 
documenting that ban: why TATWEEL and only TATWEEL.

Cheers !
jfc





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