Re-sending TXT form of Proposed IDNA2008 Transition Idea

[Cary Karp]

> Finally, I am pretty sure that having an IETF WG, most of whose
> members have little knowledge of how large-scale all-delegation
> or mostly-delegation domains are operated, isn't going to be
> taken seriously if it starts writing global requirements on what
> zone administrators must do.  Analyzing various cases and
> explaining why some options are better than others under
> specified circumstances is another matter, but that advise will,
> at best, be accepted to the extent to which the analyses and
> reasoning make sense to the operators.

As long as we've gotten to that statement via a discussion of 
responsible registry behavior and ICANN, this is as good a time as any 
to note that ICANN has gathered a group of representatives of TLDs that 
have long since devised and implemented policies and procedures for IDN 
registration. They maintain a set of "IDN Guidelines" that reflect their 
collective experience. The gTLDs are bound by contract both to adhere to 
the Guidelines and to contribute to their development, but the ccTLDs 
also participate in these action.

The intention is for the Guidelines to be useful in any registry context 
where IDN support is offered and to be recognizable as such on their 
intrinsic merit. There is an obvious risk that the extent of their 
readership could be reduced if they were taken as being exclusively an 
ICANN instrument. The authorship group therefore agreed that any such 
effect might be offset if the Guidelines were, instead, put forward as 
an IETF BCP. However, the way the present discussion is going, I'm not 
sure how vigorously the group will continue to find that worth pursuing.

One way or the other, in case the present w.g. does not realize it, the 
TLD registries that provide extensive support for decorated Latin 
characters have spent a lot of time considering every possible nuance of 
their bundling (and for the most part dismissed it as a conceptually 
solid but practically unimplementable process). Although I've been 
shouting it from the housetops without gathering much of an audience, 
the addition of ß to the available repertoire does not challenge the 
procedures that are already well in place to even a fraction of the 
extent that is assumed here.

/Cary