Charter changes and a possible new direction

Patrik Fältström patrik at frobbit.se
Wed Jan 14 21:46:56 CET 2009


On 14 jan 2009, at 20.36, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> My point is partly that, to me, a
> big motivation has been to replace the tables (which are bound to a
> particular version of Unicode) with rules that can be applied no
> matter what version of Unicode we use.  I used to think that was a big
> win.  But the accretion of exceptions, plus the potential effects of
> local mappings, now makes me wonder whether I was right.

Note that Paul, as far as I can see, actually suggest two different  
things that should not be mixed with each other:

1. Should we use a rule based approach that can be applied to any  
version of Unicode?

2. Should we still have the exception table, backwards compatibility  
table, and specifically, the contextual rules?

Of course, with a table approach (talked about in question 1), the  
exception table for the _current_ version of Unicode can always be  
included in the table.

But, if we for example remove contextual rules, therefore remove tons  
of the "complicated stuff" from IDNA, then we have the solution again  
that you and I maybe was hoping on.

Note for example that I was saying "no" on the request to have Eszett  
added to the exceptions table. I have basically been against anything  
be added there. EXCEPT when the doors opened and we added Eszett  
because of reasonable requests from users, and we added final sigma  
because of reasonable requests from Greece, then we could also add  
stuff from Korea, and Indic/arabic community etc.

So, if we reopen questions/issues again, we must remember to separate  
the various issues we have on the table here.

When we get the same view on for example contextual rules, what is the  
difference between IDNAv2 and IDNA2008? Well, the difference wether  
the rules are standardized or not, so that we can move forward exactly  
as you want without being forced to update the RFC every time we get  
codepoints added to Unicode Tables.

So I claim that what Paul *really* suggest is to remove contextual  
rules, minimize the exceptions table. Not so much that we should use a  
table approach.

    Patrik



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