Stop me if I've misunderstood...

Marie-France Berny mfberny at gmail.com
Thu Jul 9 15:09:17 CEST 2009


Gervase,
your questions are a repetition. Your broadside of points is an excellent
way for us to check our positions. Thank you. You definitly are an "IETF
user" like us (IUCG stands for Internet users contributing group). We take
"users" as Internet and RFC lead users.

In initating the IUCG, the initial idea was to limit ourselves to inputs and
comments. The IAB asked us more so they could discuss with us over formated
inputs. This is in line with RFC 3935 which says that "The IETF has
traditionally been a community for experimentation with things that are not
fully understood, standardization of protocols for which some understanding
has been reached, and publication of (and refinement of) protocols
originally specified outside the IETF process." We take that our job also as
to specify protocols in _parallel_ to the IETF process, in the hope it could
speed up the internal as well as the external process.

We do not feel at ease with the "acquisition" of the IETF by ISOC (this is
the way we read some of the ISOC documents to their sponsoring members). We
consider ICANN as an interesting source of (good and bad) experience in the
"IN" class and default ASCII presentation.

2009/7/9 Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org>

> On 08/07/09 23:16, Marie-France Berny wrote:
>
>> Gervase,
>> Mark gives a very fair account of the Unicode sub-problem he faces. The
>> same as you gave a very fair account of the UI sub-problem you are
>> concerned about. However, prior to addressing sub-problems we need to
>> address the main problem. The main problem is that:
>>
>> - (1) none of the existing tools sets (browsers, protocols, codes,
>> procedures, applications, IDNA2003, etc. ) is prepared to answer the
>> demands of the linguistic diversity.
>>
>
> I know little of ICANN politics or the relationship of your group to them,
> the IETF, or any other organization whose acronym begins with an I, but it
> seems self-evident to me that the above is not "the main problem", at least
> not for this group.


This is correct as the main problem I explained is not point (1) or (2) but
the conjunction of both.


> We are not here to boil the sea.


Correct but as you may know the global warming takes care of it. And we must
cope with it.

Life is imperfect. Unicode is imperfect. The DNS is not capable of
> representing all words in Latin-script languages, let alone words in all the
> other scripts. I can't have www.O'Markham.org.


Dear, why would you not ??? This is precisely the purpose of IDNA. Why would
the Scottish language be limited by IDNA?


> If there is an expectation from some language communities that every single
> word they can think of to type in can become a valid and different domain
> name, then they will be disappointed, just as the English and other
> Latin-using language communities have been for the past 30+ years.


I am afraid you confuse disapointment in the Internet and disapointment in
the Internet standards and ICANN commercial management. This kind of
self-imposed technical and R&D limitations on commercial grounds is
chastised in the IAB RFC 3869.


> If that makes them go off and form a separate Internet, there's little we
> can do about it apart from tell them they have unrealistic expectations.


The problem is not that one. The problem is how realistic is it to behave as
if the rest of the world could not circumvent this IETF imposed
disappointment. While we are documenting it. It will be a Draft as soon as
we understand how to port our bilingual wiki document under an RFC-Editor
acceptable entry in unsing XML2RFC.

Take care.
Marie-France Berny
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