Moving Right Along on the Inclusions Table...

[Martin Duerst]

Hello Daniel,

Many thanks for your comments.

At 00:09 06/12/28, Daniel Yacob wrote:

>Ethiopic doesn't have the benefit of tricks like CamelCase
>to visually indicate a word boundary, so some separator
>symbol helps clarity.

Yes. But CamelCase may be getting out of use for domain
names (if it ever was in use) because many browsers these
days display all domain names in lower case to reduce the
risk of cross-script spoofing (there are more
Latin-Greek-Cyrillic similarities for upper-case than
for lower-case letters).

>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.

The current (2003) version of IDNA allows such 'elisions'.
But the current trend is to get away from them to make
everything easier and more straightforward. It will take
some effort for users to learn that adis:abeba and adisabeba
(and others) are the same. It may be that it is overall
easier if they don't have to do that.


>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.

There could be such a rule. But the tendency is currently to leave
'single-script' rules out of the protocol and have it checked by
registrars/registries and browsers.


>>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

'will be' may be confusing. Is that planned usage, or already
occurring?

>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.

Can you give examples of such current (not planned) usages?

>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?

(This is not (yet?) an official IETF list/WG, but) in the IETF,
people participate as individuals. It is much less important
who makes some statement than what the (technical) merrits of
the statement are.

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp