BIDI rules

[John C Klensin]

Eric,

I believe that treating Bidi as experimental at this point would
be equivalent to saying "until we have more experience with
this, no one should use a domain name containing R-to-L
characters in any serious way for which future stability is
needed".    That is more or less the meaning of "experimental":
"not ready for production use".

And I don't  believe that is acceptable.

     john


--On Thursday, 04 September, 2008 13:06 -0700 Erik van der Poel
<erikv at google.com> wrote:

> 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
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