Charter changes and a possible new direction

Paul Hoffman phoffman at imc.org
Wed Jan 14 06:16:30 CET 2009


At 4:56 AM +0100 1/14/09, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>Another reason is that a programmer that implement anything with 
>Unicode can not know what version of Unicode is installed so use of 
>the installed tables is just not possible if you want to be 
>conformant.

That flies in the face of all the implementation experience we have had in the last five years. The fact that Stringprep (RFC 3454) very carefully lists the unassigned codepoints for Unicode 3.2 makes it so that anyone can make an conformant application without knowing what version the system is running.

>You have to use explicitly IDNA2003 (today) libraries and 
>not any of the Unicode libraries installed, as there might be 
>incompatibilities (what are unassigned codepoints for example).

Bosh. Table A.1 of stringprep is normative. Section 1.2 is completely clear on this:
   This document lists the unassigned code points in the range 0 to
   10FFFF for Unicode 3.2 in appendix A.  The list in appendix A MUST be
   used by implementations of this specification. 

>For IDNA2008 as of today:
>
>- Changes to Unicode: No IETF action needed
>- Changes to exceptions: IETF action needed
>- Changes to backward compatibility list: IETF action needed
>- Changes to regular expressions: IETF action needed
>
>For IDNA2008 after first IETF action according to above list:
>
>- Changes to Unicode: No IETF action needed
>- Changes to exceptions: IETF action needed
>- Changes to backward compatibility list: IANA action needed
>- Changes to regular expressions: IANA action needed
>
>For IDNAv2 we have the following:
>
>- Changes to Unicode: IETF action needed

...after some time, if there are valuable code points added in a particular version.

>- Changes to regular expressions: unclear as that is not specified in 
>the draft yet

And will not be specified. The draft is clear on this.


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