Follow-up to Monday's discussion of digits

Eric Brunner-Williams ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Mon Dec 1 01:41:13 CET 2008


Martin,

I plan to send in mine on Tuesday.

Eric

Martin Duerst wrote:
> At 23:50 08/11/28, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 08:26:52AM -0500, Vint Cerf wrote:
>>     
>
>   
>>> It appears that many of your colleagues find the ban on mixing of  
>>> European, Arabic-Indic and Eastern Arabic-Indic either reasonable or  
>>> even necessary.
>>>       
>> It seems to me this exchange is landing us squarely back into the
>> issue of confusability, and we already adopted a principle that
>> confusability rulings ought to be made by registries and handled by
>> policy, rather than getting bound up in the protocol.  Confusability
>> isn't enough for the restriction in the protocol.
>>     
>
> I have to agree. The confusability between the two series of Arabic
> digits is very high (out of 10 digits, 7 of them look the same and
> mean the same thing), but I still (as I said earier) don't see the
> need of prohibiting combinations of them in the protocol (except
> maybe for bidi).
>
>   
>> John's argument for some restriction (in Minneapolis) was, I thought,
>> dependent on the premise that a majority (or siginficant minority) of
>> user agents do so many funky things with the encoding in between the
>> keyboard and the wire that it's all but impossible to guarantee
>> results without this change to the protocol.
>>     
>
> There has been some promize that the arguments given orally in
> Minneapolis would be written up. I haven't seen that writeup yet.
> [If I missed it, please send me a pointer.] The above summary
> also doesn't provide any relevant information. If keyboards
> are unpredictable, what's the difference between a restriction
> in the protocol and a restriction by a registry?
>
>
>
>   
>> Without that premise, I don't think there's any principled way to
>> include the restriction in the protocol.  Therefore, we need to know
>> whether the premise is true.
>>     
>
> Agreed. And not only the premise, but also how the premise implies
> the conclusion.
>
> 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     
>
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