Heart-shaped digits (was: Re: Follow-up from Tuesday's discussion of digits in the Latin and Arabic Script blocks)

[John C Klensin]

Hi.

I'm getting confused about what we are disagreeing about here,
if anything.   Extended Arabic-Indic digit five isn't a symbol,
it is a perfectly good numeral.   The only possible restriction
on the use of that character in an otherwise-Latin string would
be a registry "mixed script" or "character list" rule, and those
are not our problem.

What a character "looks like", either with regard to other
characters or to what the user is somehow expecting to see is
very subjective and likely to differ from one user to the next
as well as interacting with the issues raised by artistic fonts.
The subjectivity of those visual confusion issues are a large
fraction of the reason we've agreed, several times, to not
address confuseability or phishing as part of the protocol
efforts.

If the .IR registry wants to permit mixing an Extended
Arabic-Indic numeral with Latin alphabetic and hyphen characters
in this way, no one is going to try to prevent it (and I can
find nothing in the protocol (or Bidi) that does so).  Some
would consider it unwise, others might applaud its cleverness,
but the decision is up to the registry.

So what is the disagreement?

      john


--On Thursday, 04 December, 2008 00:10 +0330 Alireza Saleh
<saleh at nic.ir> 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'.
> 
> 
> Alireza
> 
> 
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