On blame (was: Re: Casefolding Sigma (was: Re: IDNAbis
Preprocessing Draft))
Paul Hoffman
phoffman at imc.org
Tue Jan 22 17:52:24 CET 2008
At 7:29 AM -0500 1/22/08, Vint Cerf wrote:
>ietf will be blamed for every abuse that can be traced to overly
>permissive application of Unicode. Every design choice IS policy,
>even if you do not seem to see it that way.
Vint points to one of the guiding motivations for much of the IDNA
effort in the last year before we released the standard. However, I
think that motivation was a bad one, and one that actually caused us
to make more mistakes than if we had shipped something more simple
and clean.
Afterwards, people who spend more of their time in the IETF would
often try to shift that blame on the Unicode Standard; people who
spend more of their time in the Unicode Consortium would often try to
shift that blame on the IETF process. And here we both are today on
this mailing list, mostly frustrated and grumpy with each other.
I propose that the folks participating in this effort try to stop
worrying about being blamed for errors. There will be plenty of blame
and anger aimed at us (for some value of "us") regardless of whether
the result is long and over-optimized or short and lacking enough
special cases. We should design and deploy based on technical issues,
not fear of blame.
More information about the Idna-update
mailing list