Stop me if I've misunderstood...

Andrew Sullivan ajs at shinkuro.com
Fri Jul 10 01:46:53 CEST 2009


On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 04:35:35PM -0700, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> 
> Now scale it from an artificial éxample with one non-ASCII
> letter, and consider Vietnamese, where nearly every syllable
> has an accented-non-ASCII vowel, and where there are also
> common non-ASCII consonants. Suddenly you've imposed a
> combinatorial explosion burden on the Vietnamese zone operator.

Well, Paul asked me to react to an artificial example, so I did.  If
you're asking me, "Do I think this can reasonably be handled at the
zone operator in every case?" I don't have a ready answer for you.
The best I can do is, "Maybe," since we could in fact program a
zone-operator-mapping front end for zones using exactly the same
mapping that "UIs" are going to use (to use the term that Shawn
objected to in another message).  But whether zone operators, many of
whom still don't use automatic tools even to update their serial
numbers, are going to use such a non-vi technology is not entirely
clear to me.

> I thought we were coming to consensus a couple months
> ago that casemapping and width mapping (for fullwidth
> and halfwidth forms in East Asian character sets) should
> properly be considered a part of the protocol, but that
> other mappings for backwards compatibility with IDNA 2003
> were more marginal and could reasonably be considered as
> part of a preprocessing mapping recommendation document.
> 
> But it appears that the group has now made a hard right
> turn somewhere, and is trying to throw out the baby
> with the bathwater, citing a line in the charter as
> a justification for a technical decision about best
> protocol design, and settling on a position that
> mapping should not be in the protocol at all.

I thought this discussion we are having right now is not "having made
a decision" but rather "coming to some decision by working through the
issues."  I don't see anything wrong with going over the ground
several times if we think it will illuminate the issues.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.


More information about the Idna-update mailing list