UTC Agenda Item: IDNA proposal

[Michael Everson]

At 15:07 -0500 2006-11-23, Vint Cerf wrote:
>Though a rank layman in this matter, starting with a restricted set 
>and opening it up as it appears to be feasible strikes me as a 
>prudent step.

And a necessary one.

>Getting linguists involved has benefit and risk. It would be quite easy to
>argue strongly that every character is needed for full expressiveness - such
>an argument would likely stem from a serious lack of appreciation both of
>the DNS itself and the potential destructive interference of various
>characters drawn from distinct languages.

I quite agree. But getting linguists who understand IDN as well as 
Unicode is not entirely impossible. ;-)

>I would assume, perhaps wrongly, that some linguistic experts would 
>not necessarily be aware of the lookalike problems or even care 
>about them if they know of them, in the absence of the context of 
>DNS use in URLs, email addresses and the like.

Oh, you assume rightly, most definitely so! It's important to 
understand the extremely narrow context which IDN is attempting to 
address.

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you who are celebrating it. We had a 
splendid one with friends in Dublin.
-- 
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com