Stability of valid IDN labels

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Tue Apr 22 19:54:00 CEST 2008



--On Tuesday, 22 April, 2008 10:49 +0900 Martin Duerst
<duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

> Not really. The old MAYBE included lots of scripts that the
> draft authors were not overly familliar with, in bulk. What
> may happen is that DISALLOWED is treated more closely to the
> way it is in IDNA2003: okay to query, but forbidden to
> register.

Martin, that state for MAYBE was assumed to be _very_ temporary.
It included a great many scripts with which the authors, or
experts with whom they consulted, were extremely familiar but
for which there were known issues that needed to be resolved.
To give two familiar examples, CJK was placed into MAYBE to
permit working though a decision process as to whether the many
characters should be separated into a preferred group
(presumably the union of the "preferred variant" lists under RFC
3743 or a small superset of it) and a less-desirable one
(everything else, including most or all of the Plane 2
ideographs).   Had that distinction been drawn, the preferred
group would have become Protocol-Valid ("Always" in the old
terminology) and a second decision made as to whether to leave
the others in "MAYBE" (perhaps "MAYBE NO") or to disallow them.

Similarly, for the Arabic and Indic scripts, discussions are now
ongoing that have already led to some discussions on this list.

But, while it may be useful to have the history correct, all of
that is history unless someone is going to propose
re-introducing MAYBE.  That certainly won't be me.

    john




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