Objection to draft-klensin-idna-5892upd-unicode70

[Paul Hoffman]

On Aug 11, 2014, at 10:03 AM, Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh at google.com> wrote:

> I found about draft-klensin-idna-5892upd-unicode70 last week. I highly object to the potential standardization of that draft, due to its singling out characters needed for minority communities. For comparison, none of the existing DISALLOWED characters in RFC 5892 is a part of the basic alphabet of a language. If the draft is adopted, users of the Fulfulde language cannot use words with an implosive /b/ in their domain names, being singled out for no consistent reason.

Can we please tone down the drama here? Until two months ago, they couldn't use the character in question in any written text.

> Unicode is full of confusable characters and character sequences (with no canonical or compatibility decomposition pointing to them). Using a canonical or compatibility decomposition mechanism only for finding such cases doesn't make sense, nor does singling out some more obvious cases of such confusables.

That seems like a non sequitur because the draft never talks about "confusable". It talks about issues of composition. Given that difference, do you still highly object to the draft based on its contents?

--Paul Hoffman