Implementation questions (digressing from...)

[Paul Hoffman]

At 1:44 PM -0500 12/25/08, Vint Cerf wrote:
>I believe there has been consensus to remove mappings in the formulation of the IDNA2008 standards.

Note that the consensus was agreed to before the WG had discussed making changes that would make previously-mapped-out characters valid. Now that people see that the protocol will make correctly-implemented existing software non-interoperable with the new protocol, there seems to be questions about that.

>It is clearly an issue how to convey to implementors the implications of this - which is one reason that
>the Rationale document is so important.

Indeed. If the document is not available or not clearly understandable to everyone who needs to be making the new decisions, then interoperability with existing will suffer.