Final Sigma (was: RE: Esszett, Final Sigma, ZWJ and ZWNJ)

[Vaggelis Segredakis]

Dear Vint and all,

Thank you for your replies on the issues I brought. My intention was to
highlight that there are only certain things a registry can do with the
bundling of domain names and they are not many. The issues that exist are
more complicated than one can think, even for European languages.

We, along with other interested parties are going to present this WG with a
unified position on how we would like the final sigma issue to be handled
fairly soon. We do not wish to extend this discussion to mapping accents
although if this discussion turns to x.-- as proposed this will be an agenda
item as well. We fully understand that a mapping creates a loss of
information.

If you all really do not wish for x.-- solutions to appear there is one more
issue this WG has to recommend for. The use of DNAME, if it was working as
expected, would be a solution for the mapping of domain names. This is not
happening because DNAME was not supposed to be working for bundling.

Today the need of bundling is obvious. DNS should be equipped with a real
tool for this, a xNAME entry that would fully equalize two domain names and
their associated tree.

I know it is not for this WG to decide on that, I am hoping though that you
have the ability to push to this direction. IDNs are not easily deployed if
they do not offer a good end-user experience. Without good solutions
proposed and implemented the use of IDNs will remain a poor experience, full
of IF-THEN....

Vaggelis

-----Original Message-----
From: Vint Cerf [mailto:vint at google.com] 
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2009 6:33 AM
To: Erik van der Poel
Cc: Vaggelis Segredakis; Mark Davis; Tina Dam; Euripides Zervanos;
Panagiotis Papaspiliopoulos; idna-update at alvestrand.no; Sotiris Panaretou
Subject: Re: Final Sigma (was: RE: Esszett, Final Sigma, ZWJ and ZWNJ)

Before we go down the path of introducing a collection of prefixes, I  
think we have a lot to get done with the xn-- version first.

vint


Vint Cerf
Google
1818 Library Street, Suite 400
Reston, VA 20190
202-370-5637
vint at google.com




On Feb 25, 2009, at 12:48 PM, Erik van der Poel wrote:

> Hello Vaggelis,
>
> Thank you for staying in touch with this WG.
>
> Are you saying that you are seeing fewer registrations or actual use
> of xn-- names under .gr?
>
> One idea might be to reserve xn-- for the "global" mappings that are
> based on Unicode specs. Then you and other Greek script users could
> come up with a spec for the Greek script and/or language, and the
> prefix to use in that case could be gr-- or if that is politically
> sensitive, just take the "next" prefix after xn-- which would be xo--
> since 'o' comes after 'n'.
>
> Under this scenario, non-ASCII host names in HTML hrefs would be
> transformed using the global mappings, and then converted to Punycode,
> and xn-- would be prepended.
>
> The only way to get xo-- names into HTML would be to use the xo-- form
> (not non-ASCII, not ꯍ).
>
> Then there could be an extra field in the DNS that indicates how to
> display those names in Unicode form. I.e. it would tell you which
> sigmas are supposed to be final, which characters should have a tonos,
> and so on.
>
> Erik
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 3:02 AM, Vaggelis Segredakis
> <segred at ics.forth.gr> wrote:
>> Dear Mark and Tina,
>>
>>
>>
>> The original IDNA2003 mapping has made life easier for us on the  
>> final sigma
>> -> sigma issue but the example Mark presented brings forth another  
>> very big
>> problem we have faced with that version: In Greek you never put a
>> hyphenation mark in a word consisting only by capital letters. The  
>> correct
>> uppercase for χρήσης.gr (xn--jxas2ajbt.gr) is ΧΡΗΣΗΣ.gr  
>> (xn--sxaa2ajbt.gr)
>> and not ΧΡΉΣΗΣ.gr which was accepted by IDNA2003 as the only  
>> equivalent.
>>
>>
>>
>> We started there and then to use bundling options to bundle DNS  
>> tags to make
>> them work as our language is normally used where it should have  
>> been the
>> other way round. IDNA tags should be able to represent languages as  
>> they are
>> used. It happens in Latin character languages.
>>
>>
>>
>> I would welcome a solution that takes this second issue into  
>> account as well
>> and further simplifies life for Greek users who get a poor  
>> experience of the
>> IDNs. We had already a meeting with our Telecommunications  
>> regulator, our
>> Government and the .CY registry and we tried to raise a common  
>> position on
>> this new solution of the final sigma representation as a separate  
>> character.
>> The results of this meeting are pending but from my understanding a  
>> more
>> global solution on these issues that haunt the Greek IDNs would be  
>> more
>> welcome than patches on a problematic protocol.
>>
>>
>>
>> My belief is that if a broader solution would be welcomed by this  
>> working
>> group, our LIC would be interested to participate in a broad public
>> discussion for a consensus in how we wish our IDNs to operate. The  
>> question
>> is if this WG is ready to bend some rules and change some former  
>> decisions
>> because it looks that xn-- might be a thing of the past soon.
>>
>>
>>
>> Vaggelis
>>
>>