Making progress on the mapping question

Paul Hoffman phoffman at imc.org
Tue Mar 31 17:15:20 CEST 2009


One of the things that a few people said at the mics last week was that we need to be much more specific about what we mean when each of us says "mapping".

At 7:41 AM -0400 3/30/09, Vint Cerf wrote:
>1. first look up under IDNA2008 rules
>2. If a domain name is found, return the corresponding results
>3. If a domain name is not fund, apply IDNA2003 mapping
>4. If a domain name is found, return the results
>5. If a domain name is not found, report that no such domain name exists

Take i<heart>blogging.blogspot.com. A fairly reasonable definition for "mapping" in step 3 is "follow the steps in RFC 3490 for ToASCII". If so, in step 4 that domain name will return positive.

At 9:17 AM -0400 3/31/09, Vint Cerf wrote:
>We are not going to revisit this for the Nth time. The WG long ago
>concluded to drop these symbols from IDNA2008 and nothing has changed.

That sounds like you emphatically do not want step 3 to return positive for i<heart>blogging.blogspot.com. Thus, you (and each of us) need to give a more complete definition of "mapping".

On a related note, Mark's proposal from yesterday defines mapping quite precisely, but does not follow the steps above because the mapping is done before what you have as step 1. So, the WG needs to decide both what it means by "mapping", and when that will be applied.


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