Follow-up from Tuesday's discussion of digits in the Latin and Arabic Script blocks
Harald Alvestrand
harald at alvestrand.no
Wed Dec 3 21:50:02 CET 2008
Alireza Saleh wrote:
> Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>>> Which brings me to true love, or the similarity of the "eastern
>>> arabic-indic" character for the digit "5" and the apparently human
>>> glyph for "heart", and also "emoji" enjoyed by CJK script users, and
>>> conceivably by Cree Syllabics and other script users. I suppose an
>>> emoticon is appropriate here, so ";-)".
>>>
>>>
>>> There is, in the .ir namespace, a label which contains
>>> "from-my-heart-to-your-heart", with each "eastern arabic-indic"
>>> digit "5" rendered (correctly) as a heart.
>>>
>>>
>> Since the IDNA2008 effort long ago decided to ban symbols, including
>> the 11 "heart" symbols in Unicode (all of which are class "So"),
>> fairness would dictate that we give no special consideration to use
>> of numbers as symbols outside their linguistic context.
>>
>> Harald
>>
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>
> I think that symbols and numbers are not entirely comparable; you don’t
> completely ban numerals in the protocol. Nor can you ban their ASCII use
> in non-numerical context. How could you ban <domains4you.com>? So the
> question is what overwhelming technical requirement leads you to set a
> double-standard for ASCII and IDN? You just need a better argument than
> saying that numbers should be confined to 'their linguistic context'
> or 'Visual confusions'.
I'm saying that the fact that someone uses the Extended Arabic-Indic
Digit 5 as if it was a heart symbol should have no weight in the
discussion on whether the restriction against using Extended
Arabic-Indic Digit 5 in the same label as the Arabic-Indic Digit 5
should be a protocol restriction or a registry-level restriction.
That's all. I never even tried to suggest banning numbers in general.
Harald
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