Consensus Call Tranche 8 Summary - Addendum

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Wed Oct 22 14:53:16 CEST 2008



--On Tuesday, 21 October, 2008 17:21 +0900 Martin Duerst
<duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

>...
> One idea I just had was to create a category HISTORIC.
> While this category would be equivalent to PROTOCOL-VALID
> for the protocol, it would clearly give some information
> to registries out there. Because it would not mean any
> decision with regards to protocol, it might be easier
> for us to come forward with some guidelines on what
> to put into HISTORIC, easier than it was with MAYBE
> and friends. Just an idea. And it wouldn't help for
> the Greek final Sigma, but it would send a signal for
> Hangul and other scripts.

Martin,

Whatever  the other advantages or disadvantages of this
approach, I believe that:

	(i) The now-long-dead idea of "MAYBE NO" was intended to
	serve the role of "usable if needed and should be
	resolved, but should not be permitted by registries
	unless there were special needs".  The conclusion was
	that it was too hard to define properly and too
	uncertain to be practical.  While I'm not sure that
	decision was optimal, I hope we do not have to revisit
	it and do not believe its possible advantages are worth
	the time that discussing it and trying to specify it
	would cost us.
	
	(ii) As we have seen in earlier discussions,
	perspectives on what is and is not historic differ,
	partially because of the existence of scholarly
	communities that might consider labels to have helpful
	and obvious mnemonic value even though the associated
	scripts have not been used to represent anyone's first
	language in tens of centuries.  While we often assume
	that those cases would mostly occur in the third level
	of the tree and below, the current documents carefully
	do not distinguish among registries at various levels of
	the tree (a characteristic that I believe is very
	important and that, given the DNAME-related issues that
	have been problematic for some Bidi approaches, possibly
	an absolute necessity).  And, fwiw, nothing in the
	current ICANN rules other than the need to raise the
	money would prevent a community from proposing a TLD
	for, e.g., .HITTITE in the appropriate script.

There is an existing, long-standing but non-protocol,
recommendation to registries, which is that it is a bad idea to
register labels that use any script that they do not fully
understand.  For most registries and obvious reasons, that
recommendation subsumes "be careful with Historic scripts or
characters".   I believe that recommendation is common sense,
although a hypothetical particularly greedy registry or
registrar might not agree.  If people feel that recommendation
should be made explicit in the documents somewhere, please
suggest text and where to put it.

      john




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