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

[Roozbeh Pournader]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 11:11 AM, Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman at vpnc.org>
wrote:

> Until two months ago, they couldn't use the character in question in any
> written text.
>

That's not true.

The character was approved at the UTC meeting of February 2011. The SIL
representatives who needed the character urgently were promised at the
meeting that Unicode would not change the codepoint, so they could start
using the character immediately. So in reality, they had three years and a
half.

Also, the character has been a part of ISO/IEC 10646 since Amendment 1 to
the 2012 edition which was published in April 2013. It was frozen in that
standard much earlier before that too.

> 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?
>

Definitely. There is no difference. The issue that the draft is calling
"composition" existed with the Arabic characters (and characters in several
other scripts) long before this character, and several other new Unicode
7.0 characters expose such a behavior.

In short, U+08A1 is not exposing a composition issue, but a confusability
issue. The draft does not reflect the problem with a good understanding of
the Unicode model (for Arabic and other scripts). The problem with U+08A1
is no different than, say, U+0692, used in Kurdish that could be perceived
to be composed of U+0631 and U+065A.

Please explain how U+08A1 is different from U+0692 with regard to
"composition".
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