MVALID (was Re: M-Label or MVALID, and dangers with mappings?)
Pete Resnick
presnick at qualcomm.com
Tue Apr 14 20:58:37 CEST 2009
On 4/14/09 at 7:52 AM -0700, Mark Davis wrote:
>Having arbitrary mappings, subject to "application context" just
>makes a messy situation worse: if program 1 sees
>href="http://ÖBB.at" and goes to http://öbb.at, but program 2 goes
>to the different http://oebb.at, we have a horrible interoperability
>problem.
First of all, you should have a look at the ripe mess your email
client turned those IRIs into. (It chose "%" encoding, which is quite
fun.) But leaving that aside:
Who said *ANYTHING* about *ARBITRARY* mappings? Straw man fallacy
here. As far as I can tell, we *are* writing a mappings document and
it *will* map "ÖBB" to "öbb". For program 2 in your example to choose
not to implement that mapping would mean that either (a) it had
discovered that more people using the Lower-Slobovian version of its
web browser want to go to "oebb.at" instead of "öbb.at" and its users
scream if it tries to send them to "öbb.at" or (b) they are stupid,
its users will scream that they are not getting to the right web
site, and it will be fixed. This is *all* about user expectations and
*not* usurping them by insisting that there is one and only one way
for a user to type a name, and all other ways that we haven't thought
of in 2009 are forbidden to implement.
>I had thought that we were making some progress towards having a
>uniform single mapping handling at least case and width, which users
>really want (Cf the CJK presentation at the latest IETF meeting).
Argumentum ad populum. Nice. Do we get to cover all of the informal
logical fallacies today?
First of all, on what basis are you claiming that *you know* what
"users really want"? The CJK presentation was probably about the
desires of the registry community, but I'm not at all sure what it
says about the desires of the end users of most domain names. So lets
just drop these histrionics about what "users really want." What
"users really want" is web browsers that get them to the place they
want to go when they type what they think will get them there. My
guess is that most users don't know what they want at the protocol
level.
And for that matter the CJK presentation started with the assumption
that there was *NO* mapping. If we introduce a mapping as some of us
have described here (one that is not necessarily written in stone for
the rest of time), perhaps that would satisfy the concerns expressed
in that presentation. In the last slide of that presentation, most of
what I think of as the mapping step was put in a box labeled "BCP".
That doesn't sound like part of the protcol proper to me.
>Mapping is not just a UI issue.
Another straw man. I never said that mapping was *just* a UI issue.
But it is in large part a UI issue in this context.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
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