Tables and contextual rule for Katakana middle dot

[Paul Hoffman]

At 3:35 PM +0200 4/7/09, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>Yoshiro YONEYA wrote:
>> Dear Patrik-san,
>>
>> Japanese uses Hiragana, Katakana, Han, Alphabet letters (a-z), and
>> digit (0-9) for names.  KATAKANA MIDDLEDOT is usually used with those
>> names, so the following kind of case is really exists and used:
>>
>>     Play<KATAKANA MIDDLEDOT>Station<KATAKANA MIDDLEDOT>4.jp
>>
>> That is the reason why I said "Japanese context".
>>
>> To be precise, Japanese scripts (for IDN) are consists from:
>>
>>     Hiragana, Katakana, Han, Alphabet, Digit,
>>     IDEOGRAPHIC CLOSING MARK, IDEOGRAPHIC NUMBER ZERO,
>>     KATAKANA MIDDLEDOT and IDEOGRAPHIC ITERATION MARK
>>
>> Extracting Alphabet and Digit from the list is unacceptable.
>>
>> I'll try to express this ambiguous situation more clearly.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>>  
>Speaking with sadness:
>
>If this is the case, I think we will have to declare KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT
>to have the same status as the apostrophe: Not permitted.

Disagree. It would be good to give Yoneya-san more time to come up with a proposal for contextual rules. Even if his rules don't permit every situation where the dot is used in common names that might be host labels, they would be better than prohibiting this very common character.