Casefolding Sigma (was: Re: IDNAbis Preprocessing Draft)

JFCM jefsey at jefsey.com
Thu Jan 24 20:41:36 CET 2008


Dear Cary,
this question is truely important.

However, please let consider who and where it is to be addressed, 
because it is not to be addressed here.
1. the regalian considerations are an issue for the ISO TC46/SG2 and UN
2. the Internet aspects are at to be addressed at user application 
layer. An IETF suggestion for a consistent resolution of this kind of 
issue could certainly be of real interest and of possible great help. 
But it is something on the way to display the IDN, not something in 
relation with IDN resolution.

This is why I am at the same time very happy of the ICANN 
introduction of a tentative IDN glossary (I suppose you were 
involved?), as an element for dialog, and the general lack of 
identification of what belongs to ISO, IETF, Unicode, ICANN, etc.

This should be established first. In all this IDNA issue a lot of 
clarifications are still to be done. Another problem is its semantic. 
Multilingualism call for multiple translations. But we lack a 
multilingual glossary of polynym terms. So, for example, the French 
version introduces confusion between labels and tags. All this has to 
be considered, delays a consensus, but is also a way to undestand 
that multilingualistics (to make languages and scripts simultaneously 
supported) is something different from linguistics.
jfc

At 19:07 24/01/2008, Cary Karp wrote:
> > Actually, I fully agree. However, the ietf will also be blamed for
> > every case where it's standards lead to results that are considered
> > to disregard (replace 'disregard' with stronger words if you want;
> > probably stronger words will be used by the people affected) culture
> > and customs. In this sense again, every design choice IS policy,
> > even if it might not look that way.
> >
> > What we have to try to do is to find the best middle ground,
> > not to design only in one direction.
>
>I certainly agree that we need to curb exaggerated expectations about
>the orthographic flexibility of IDN labels. Toward that end, we have
>often emphasized the one extreme case by dismissing the notion of
>domain names as vehicles for literary statements. Notwithstanding the
>underlying technical parameters, there are serious political
>considerations that we might also be well advised to keep in mind.
>
>While we're arguing about the final form sigma, representatives of
>national governments are busy considering localized representations of
>the names of their countries specifically for use as IDN labels. What
>happens when Cyprus is under consideration and the Cypriots wonder why
>everybody else has the option of considering the full name of their
>country, spelled correctly to boot?  (And whatever the answer to that
>question is, if the constraint happened to be felt elsewhere, would we
>be equally willing to convey the same message to a larger and more
>influential speech community that might be inclined to consider a
>localized proprietary alternative?)
>
>/Cary
>
>
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