Archaic scripts (was: Re: New version:draft-ietf-idna-tables-01.txt)

Kenneth Whistler kenw at sybase.com
Thu May 8 20:45:15 CEST 2008


Gerv said:

> On the cuneiform point, only a handful of people worldwide have 
> keyboards set up to type those letters, and only a further handful have 
> fonts to display them. Even if that small group wants to set up a 
> website about cuneiform (entirely possible) that doesn't mean it 
> requires a cuneiform domain name - and, in fact, if it had one, it would 
> significantly restrict its readership.

Exactly. See, for example:

http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/

John Heise is one of the handful of people around the world who
could actually be expected to be able to write Akkadian
*in cuneiform*. But the chances that he would register a cuneiform
domain name for this site and move his material there, dooming it
to restricted readership, is basically zero.

> If cuneiform gets in, IMO it would be a sign that the process is still 
> broken in the way outlined above.

I agree. If we can't keep at least some eye on what is
useful for IDNs while designing the contents of this
table, then I think we are shirking our tasks here.

And the fact is that we have already reached consensus on
restricting any number of symbols and punctuation marks
to DISALLOWED that by almost any objective measure I can
think of would be hundreds of times more useful in IDNs than
anything from the list of archaic scripts under discussion
here. What sense does that make?

--Ken





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