Proposed document structure and content for IDNA

Martin Duerst duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp
Fri Jul 11 03:51:41 CEST 2008


Great to see some alternative proposals for document organization.
I'm still a bit split on this one.

On the one hand, it would really be good to have a good rationale
document, especially because some of the currently proposed changes
(that I'm still quite sceptical about) indeed benefit from a clear
and solid justification.

On the other hand, I totally agree that there is quite a bit of
disagreement over rationale and even more about issues, and that
for some of this stuff (I think that was in a document that has
already been published), I wasn't even able to read much more
than a paragraph or two because a lot of it was unjustified and
unnecessary.

In the end, I'd guess that no rationale document is better than
a confusing rationale document that takes a lot of work.

Regards,    Martin.


At 02:37 08/07/11, Paul Hoffman wrote:
>Greetings again. This is in reply to many comments that were made at 
>the face-to-face meeting in Philly meeting, and prompted by Vint's 
>message yesterday about preparing for the Dublin meeting.
>
>There are three large problems with the structure and content of the 
>current set of documents; fortunately, all are easy to fix at the 
>same time.
>
>- An implementer would have to read some parts of all four documents 
>in order to do any implementation of IDNA2008
>
>- An implementer would need to determine which parts of the four 
>documents were commentary / history / rationale versus which parts 
>are needed for an interoperable implementation
>
>- There is a possibly-permanent lack of consensus about the rationale 
>for updating IDNA2003 to IDNA2008
>
>Given these three, and easy solution would be to create a single 
>document that has just the needed protocol pieces without any 
>personal commentary, history, or rationale.
>
>Having a single document such as this would make it much easier for 
>the WG to review. The long, pendulous threads from the past few 
>months have often been more about rationale than about protocol, and 
>even when they were about protocol, they devolved into rationale 
>arguments.
>
>Having a single document such as this would make it more likely that 
>IDNA2008 implementations would fully interoperate. Implementers would 
>not need to guess at the WG's intentions: the protocol would be fully 
>specified in one place.
>
>Having a single document such as this would make IDNA2008 clearer 
>than IDNA2003. Our decision to split IDNA2003 into multiple 
>interlinked documents seemed right at the time, but we have heard 
>repeatedly since then that it wasn't a good idea. Including some of 
>or rationale also seemed like a good idea, but that turned out wrong 
>as well.
>
>In summary, we should:
>
>- Merge the four documents into one (keeping all the authors, of course)
>- Completely strip out the commentary / history / rationale
>- Move forwards with one concise protocol document
>
>Thoughts?
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#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp     



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