Eszett

[Mark Davis ⌛]

If we were starting with a blank slate, it would be feasible to have ß/ẞ
kept separate from ss/SS (although note that the German national standards
body doesn't: the uppercase of ß is SS, which is why they got connected in
the first place in Unicode).

*But we are not starting with a clean slate: *we are facing with changes to
an existing widely-deployed standard, over 6 years old, which is a long time
in terms of the web <http://%c3%b6bb.at/>. We have two options.
A. Maintain compatibility with IDNA2008:  * URL * * Result
* *When*  http://ÖBB.at <http://xn--bb-eka.at> http://xn--bb-eka.at *always*
http://öbb.at <http://xn--bb-eka.at>

 B. Try to separate them, leaving users with a de-facto indeterminant
mapping.   * URL * * Result
* *When*  http://ÖBB.at <http://xn--bb-eka.at> http://xn--bb-*nha*.at *
sometimes*  http://ÖBB.at <http://xn--bb-eka.at> http://xn--bb-eka.at *
sometimes*
  http://öbb.at <http://xn--bb-eka.at> http://xn--bb-eka.at *always*

 Why would this happen? Well, for some indeterminant time, both idna2003 and
idna2008 clients will exist. So you send an email with your favorite bank to
friends, and the site they go to is a spoof site. Moreover, in an effort to
maintain compatibility for clients, some client-software will do a dual
lookup; first try one then the other. If someone comes in with an
intervening registration, for a spoof site, then a URL that used to work for
you now fails.

Now perhaps the NICs for de, at, and ch will address this by bundling or
blocking. But bundling or blocking defeats the purpose of separating them,
and there is little reason to think that .com, .biz, .whatever will all do
the same; and that is not to speak of the many, many more registries below
the top level.


Mark


On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 03:13, Cary Karp <ck at nic.museum> wrote:

> > I just hope that ß/ẞ are left alone and not conflated with esses at
> > least not by us; a registrar may wish to do so.
>
> That's what I feel, as well.
>
> /Cary
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