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

[Erik van der Poel]

On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 7:08 AM, John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com> wrote:
> --On Thursday, February 26, 2009 22:03 -0800 Erik van der Poel
> <erikv at google.com> wrote:
>> Or perhaps even a small file that contains the hint, and that
>> can be cached, similar to favicon.ico. I.e. instead of:
>>
>> http://xo--qxan.gr/favicon.ico
>>
>> we might have:
>>
>> http://xo--qxan.gr/idndisplay.txt
>
> See comment about solutions limited to HTTP above and note that
> we've already got language-associated headers that could easily
> be expanded.

No, this solution would not be limited to HTTP. It would be limited to
the times when the client has network connectivity. When the client
has temporarily lost its connection to the Internet, it would not be
able to display the IDN with the exact tonos placements and final
sigmas that the registrant intended. This would not be such a
disaster, since the string would still be quite legible. But the
network-disconnected case is not so interesting, since the client
cannot do very much anyway. And if the client had cached the display
hint earlier (when the network was connected), it could reuse that
when the network is disconnected.

Note that the French could use this too, if they wanted to display
ecole.fr as Ecole.fr.

However, idndisp.txt might be better, since it adheres to the old 8.3
rule (up to 8 characters before the dot and 3 characters after the
dot). The favicon.ico convention also adheres to 8.3.

I'm not sure whether the Greeks actually need a new prefix though.
They want /more/ characters to be mapped, not /less/. I.e. the letters
with tonos ought to be mapped to the tonos-less counterparts. More on
this later, maybe.

Erik