The situation on eszett was not an oversight in IDNA2003. It was discussed at great length. And it is not a clear-cut case. There are a handful of problematic cases: eszett, final sigma, and the Turkish i's. These were all ugly problems before Unicode; there wasn't much of a way around them. Had the Germans had an uppercase eszett, the Greeks a final capital sigma, and the Turks chosen a different accent on the i rather than have their casing be inconsistent with every other Latin alphabet, it would have been far, far easier for software. But Unicode has to recognize existing usage.<br>
<br>I still don't think I'm communicating well.<br><br>For the X/Y characters, the choices are:<br><br>BackwardCompatible automatic - stability is the norm, IETF can write RFC if it wants to change to follow Unicode.<br>
<br>BackwardCompatible not automatic - instability is the norm, IETF can write RFC if it wants to maintain stability.<br><br>Either of these two models can work - the first would be safer from a stability point of view.<br>
<br>The only point about frequency is that we expect the X/Y character situation to not occur very often, and not for very frequently-used characters. If the frequency were higher, it would even more useful to promote stability, not less. And having the BackwardCompatible
table be automatically generated promotes such stability.<br><br clear="all">Mark<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 06:29, Erik van der Poel <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:erikv@google.com">erikv@google.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 11:15 PM, Mark Davis <<a href="mailto:mark@macchiato.com">mark@macchiato.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Now, I do think that the likelyhood of the X/Y case happening is quite<br>
> small, and essentially zero with any frequently used characters.<br>
<br>
</div>Eszett is frequently used. Yet, someone made a mistake there. Can you<br>
guarantee that we didn't make any mistakes with somewhat less<br>
frequently used characters?<br>
<br>
Or is the IETF community now saying that we will not make any future<br>
changes to PVALID and DISALLOWED, no matter how loudly the affected<br>
communities scream?<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Erik<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>