[Idna-arabicscript] mapping of Full Stops

[Paul Hoffman]

At 11:13 AM -0400 10/12/09, John C Klensin wrote:
>I don't either (see above about "harmless"), except that I think
>it would be very unfortunate to have to reopen and re-review
>this document in six months or a year when someone argues that
>one or two of U+0589, U+1632, U+166E (a special case because I'm
>sure Eric can advise us as to whether that request would be
>likely to arise and be plausible), U+1803, and so on should be
>added to the list for the same types of reasons as the ones
>Sarmad describes.

Fully agree. I can't speak for Pete, but I am not willing to re-open the document to add characters to a list of optional characters. In fact, I'm not even sure there will be a "we" around in six months: the WG should close down after we have fulfilled our charter.

>So I guess I'm making a recommendation about something I should
>have spotted and made the recommendation about long ago: create
>a registry for these things.

And here we fully disagree. I think defining the rules for registries for any of the optional parts of the document will take at least another year, and we have already hit the exhaustion point. I see absolutely no upside for a registry of optional suggestions for an Informational RFC, with a significant downside of taking a lot of review time that could be better spent elsewhere.

>  The reason for that is precisely
>to prevent our needing to reopen the mapping document to add one
>or more of these characters, not to treat them with more or less
>authority. 

I see no "need" to reopen the document, ever. If someone wants to prepare a document with a different view, or with the same view but additional characters, that's fine, and quite easy in the RFC process.

>I think such additions are extremely probable,
>either as new scripts are added to Unicode or as communities
>that are now unrepresented in this WG and probably
>underrepresented on the Internet show up and explain their
>needs.  Of course, YMMD on that likelihood assessment.

We certainly agree on the likelihood of desired additions, but I think not on the "need" for a revision to the WG's document.