Proposed Charter for the IDNAbis Working Group

[Vint Cerf]

thanks for that clarification, John. I was unnecessarily conflating  
those distinct areas.

v

On Mar 27, 2008, at 3:39 PM, John C Klensin wrote:

> Vint,
>
> One small clarification...
>
> --On Thursday, 27 March, 2008 15:24 -0400 Vint Cerf
> <vint at google.com> wrote:
>
>> ...
>> Without trying to be complete, the rough outline of the
>> difference between the 200X and 2003 philosophy as I
>> understand it is  as follows:
>
>> 3. An effort has been made to deal further with bi-directional
>> scripts and with special symbols such as zero length
>> joiner/non-joiners. It appears that the latter may be
>> contextually dependent, needed in some languages but not in
>> others that might share overlapping use of a script. So there
>> are contextual rules available in the specification toolkit
>> for these contingencies
>
> While they may interact (with some uses of Arabic script in
> particular), the bi-directional and joiner issues are separate,
> with some critical applications for the latter being associated
> with some Indic scripts that are written left-to-right.  The
> contextual problem with them applies primarily to scripts with
> which those characters are never used (such as, to take a handy
> example, Latin-derived ones) because they would be invisible
> characters in that context.  But, again, these are details, not
> "basic", at least IMO.
>
>     john
>