Reserved general punctuation

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Fri May 2 21:11:59 CEST 2008



--On Friday, 02 May, 2008 11:22 -0700 Kenneth Whistler
<kenw at sybase.com> wrote:

> Frank Ellermann said:
> 
>> That is the definition at the moment.  I see UNASSIGNED
>> as an invitation to abuse where it is about code points
>> that will be never allowed.
>> 
>> I hope to get cases like u+2705 into the DISALLOWED set,
>> where they can't attract abuse attempts.
> 
> Can you provide a clear example of what kind of abuse
> you envision?
> 
> As I see it, U+2705, under the rules proposed here,
> cannot be in an IDN in 2008, or in 2018, or even if
> encoded as some kind of symbol dingbat in a distant
> version of Unicode in 2028, in an IDN in 2028.
> 
> I just don't see the marginal value here of trying
> to take some specific ranges of unassigned code points
> in Unicode and explicitly designating them in IDNA 2008
> as more toxic than ordinary unassigned code points. It
> just seems to invite confusion about the status of
> code points in the table -- and I view confusion as
> the more likely cause of attracting abuse, rather than
> anything specific about U+2705.
>...

FWIW, I agree with Ken.  We should keep unassigned code points
as UNASSIGNED (regardless of whatever else we might think we
know about them) and maintain the position that only code points
that have actually been bound to characters can be DISALLOWED
(or anything other than UNASSIGNED).  That keeps things simple
and easy to understand, and avoids all sorts of "opportunities"
with edge cases that no one has really argued that we need.

    john



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