BIDI rules

Erik van der Poel erikv at google.com
Thu Sep 4 22:06:01 CEST 2008


On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 8:26 AM, Harald Tveit Alvestrand
<harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:
> Erik van der Poel skrev:
>>
>> At the IETF meeting, I started thinking that we should not worry about
>> getting the bidi rules exactly right this time, since we still have
>> the opportunity to refine the spec as we move from Proposed to Draft,
>> and then to Standard.
>>
>> But now I'm wondering whether we might remove the bidi reference from
>> the IDNAbis protocol, and submit the bidi draft as an Experimental
>> RFC?
>
> This would only be logical if we replaced it with a statement that RTL
> characters cannot be used in domain names, unless within the confines of a
> (documented) experiment - if the main documents were to remove all
> restrictions, we can't put restrictions back.

But Harald, we *are* adding restrictions to DNS as time goes on. For a
long time, the rule was simply LDH. Now the IDNAbis draft is proposing
to add additional restrictions if the app is IDNA-aware. (See section
5.4 of protocol-03.)

All I am suggesting is that we might remove the bidi rule from the
IDNAbis protocol draft, and submit the bidi draft as an Experimental
RFC. If/when that experiment matures, we refine it and submit it as
Proposed, with those additional restrictions applying only when the
app is bidi-IDNA-aware.

Of course, IDNAbis ought to explain what happened to the bidi rules
that were in IDNA2003. Perhaps IDNAbis could have an informative
reference to the Experimental bidi-IDNA RFC, but it wouldn't have any
bidi SHOULDs or MUSTs in the protocol.

Erik


More information about the Idna-update mailing list