The real issue: interopability, and a proposal (Was: Consensus Call on Latin Sharp S and Greek Final Sigma)

[Shawn Steele]

So these 4 characters would be TRANSITIONAL, and then they’d fail completely until we’d determined the risk of breaking was low, and then we’d change them to PVALID?

My immediate concern would be the impact on ZWJ/ZWNJ.  It seems like that making those TRANSITIONAL would delay the adoption of an entire language.  I’m also concerned with the really-slow adopters.  The security risk wouldn’t completely go away, it’d just be moved to those that didn’t update their browsers in 5 or whatever years.

-Shawn

From: mark.edward.davis at gmail.com [mailto:mark.edward.davis at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mark Davis ?
Sent: ,  01,  2009 9:49
To: Alexander Mayrhofer
Cc: Patrik Fältström; Shawn Steele; Harald Alvestrand; idna-update at alvestrand.no; lisa Dusseault; "Martin J. Dürst"; Vint Cerf
Subject: Re: The real issue: interopability, and a proposal (Was: Consensus Call on Latin Sharp S and Greek Final Sigma)

…

When reading some of the transition proposals, one approach occurred to me. What if we have a new status for the 4 characters: TRANSITIONAL?

We set it up in this way; in IDNA2008, TRANSITIONAL characters are invalid for registration and lookup, AND cannot be mapped. After a period of some years, once the percentage of IDNA2003 browsers and emailers have dropped to a small proportion, the stated plan is to issue a new version of IDNA that changes them to PVALID.

That will cause currently valid URLs to fail, but that is far better than having them have ambiguous targets. This way we get to the long-term goal of having these characters be PVALID, without having the disruption during the interim.
…

Mark


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