Moving Right Along on the Inclusions Table...

[Daniel Yacob]

Greetings,

Regrets for my late response here. Michael did make the
case for Ethiopic wordspace aptly. I do not fully understand
the ins and outs of IDNA, but have added some comments
here.


>>  >Unlike the geresh and gershayim for Hebrew, it isn't an essential
>>  >component needed to build words in recognizable forms.
>>
>>  They have something that naturally does the job
>
>And isn't needed to build words in recognizable forms.
>
>Internet identifiers don't *require* word separators, and
>if anything the predominant use of the existing "-" has
>been to cause trouble and spoofing, rather than to
>"do the job".


Ethiopic doesn't have the benefit of tricks like CamelCase
to visually indicate a word boundary, so some separator
symbol helps clarity. An elision rule could avoid the
spoofing problem that befell hypen:

For Ethiopic IDNA:

1) Hyphen (-) is an invalid character.
2) Ethiopic wordspace is ignored.

thus ethiopic wordspace becomes optional in an ethiopic
domain name.  A person registering "adis:abeba.com"
(transliterated), would also have "adisabeba.com", and
vise-versa. Likewise "a:disabeba.com", "adisabe:ba.com",
etc since the ":" elides and the strings normalize
identically.

The only downside I can see here would be a case where
"adis:abeba" and "adisa:beba" normalize the same but
"adisa" and "beba" are also valid words -I am confident
that such cases will be extremely rare.


>You are wrong about this. See, for example:
>
>http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_16715
>
>which points out user confusions that result from the fact
>that the Mac OS X uses ":" as the directory separator.
>
>Allowing a ":" lookalike into the inclusion set for StringPrep
>(which would not *only* be used for NamePrep and domain names,
>by the way), is just asking for bad guys to come looking for
>ways to exploit its visual similarity to ":", especially since
>both usages would be related to syntactic separation, and
>users would not have any clear way to distinguish the subtleties
>here.


I think that the potential for mischief can be mitigated here
with restrictions imposed on the valid use of Ethiopic wordspace.
For example a rule that required only Ethiopic symbols to appear
left or right of a wordspace. I'm not acquainted with NamePrep or
StringPrep, but I expect that they could be enhanced to avoid
the problem described.


>>  >"-" is the only exceptional bit of punctuation that gets carried
>>  >forward, I think, and it has to be simply because of prior use in
>>  >ASCII-based domain names.
>>
>>  And the question of whether it is right to force that on Ethiopic
>>  which has its own delimiter is one which I think it is legitimate to
>>  ask.
>
>And is it right to force confusion on IDNA for a common
>syntax element to allow emulation of a word separation
>convention in Ethiopic which is being dropped even in
>languages using the Ethiopic script?
>


I wouldn't say "dropped", perhaps "repurposed". In mass publishing
it is not used as a word separator in paragraphs, as per the classic
use case. Of course it is still used in the classic style in more
limited market publications and in poetic works. In modern use it
will be applied in a number of new usages, so the context has become
overloaded, much like "." in western scripts. But these rules are
not stated anywhere which is also a problem.

The Ethiopian IT Professionals Association is 10 years old now,
I'm not presently a member but will join in January. I suggested
them to Michael as a body in Ethiopia that is in the best position
to take a position on the wordspace topic, as well as other
issues related to Ethiopic IDNA and phishing -yes, there are others!

If input from the group would be helpful in decision making, I
can approach them to make a statement concerning valid rules for
wordspace and to address and propose solutions to the other issues.
What would be the ideal way to receive input from a representative
technical group from Ethiopia?

thanks,

Daniel