IDNs in the root

Paul Hoffman phoffman at imc.org
Fri Jan 23 17:43:54 CET 2009


At 5:37 AM +0100 1/23/09, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>Paul Hoffman skrev:
>> At 4:55 AM +0100 1/23/09, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>>  
>>> For one thing, that makes "IDNAv2" likely to be finished well after IDNs have been introduced in the root.
>>>    
>>
>> Serious question: why is this at all relevant? Is there any IDNs that are meant to be entered in the root that will have a different encoding under IDNA2003 than under IDNA2008 or contain characters that make them unrenderable in IDNA2003?
>>
>>  
>There are many strings for which registration could be requested under
>IDNA2003 that cannot be registered under IDNA2008 (the symbols being the
>most prominent example). ICANN is aghast at the idea of having to allow
>something to be registered in the root and then having to take it out
>when the rules change.

ICANN does not *have* to allow anything to be registered, and therefore should not be aghast. It sounds like ICANN is getting some bad advice on registration practices in the root.

>I haven't seen anyone claiming that they want to register a TLD in
>Dhivehi or Yiddish (the two BIDI cases where it matters that 2003 is
>more restrictive than 2008). But there are people arguing for
>registration of a TLD with a ZWNJ in it.

That would be fine, of course.

>With the relatively restrictive rules that ICANN has put in place, it's
>not likely that any problems will be caused - but one reason for ICANN
>having to specify the restrictive rules in full rather than saying
>"stuff legal under 2008 is OK" and adding some short list of
>restrictions is that 2008 is not finished.

Good.

>In my ICANN role, I want to have stable rules that I can reference, and
>the never-ending IDNA wrangling gives the impression of instability,
>even though the actual changes we're discussing in allowed strings at
>this stage of 2008's development range from small to microscopic.

You said earlier that you have not been reading the mailing list for the last month; such a statement is obviously wrong if you had been.

>("IDNAv2" is another matter. It means we have to do it all over again.)

I take it, then, that part of what you did not read is the IDNAv2 proposal; otherwise, you would know that what you said there is wrong.


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