[Unicode Announcement] New Public Review Issue #147: Proposed Deprecation of U+0673 ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH WAVY HAMZA BELOW

[Kenneth Whistler]

> I'm curious how this impacts IDNA2003 compatibility 

It doesn't. U+0673 is valid in IDNA2003. It is PVALID in
the IDNA2008 table, and should stay that way. In
particular, any decision by the UTC to deprecate this
character is *not* a recommendation by the UTC to
change anything in the IDNA table or its derivation.

> and particularly the proposed IDNA2008 mappings.  

It doesn't.

> I suppose it is unlikely that this character is currently 
> registered in a "real" URL?

Very unlikely. As Erik van der Poel just noted.

For those worried about the impact of a deprecation in
the Unicode Standard, I don't think there is anything
to be worried about here for the protocol or mapping
documents.

The most that would fall out of this is at some future
time a registrar concerned with registration of Kashimiri
or Baluchi IDN's might take a decision to bundle
<ALEF + WAVY HAMZA> as an alternative spelling of
the "same" string for any registration seeking to use
U+0673, since that kind of equivalence would not fall
out automatically as the result of normalization of strings.

--Ken

> 
> -Shawn
> 

> > The UTC is seeking feedback on whether U+0673 should be deprecated
> > when ARABIC WAVY HAMZA BELOW is encoded. Pertinent information would
> > include data on how widespread usage of this character is. Note that
> > deprecation of a character does not mean removal of that character
> > from the standard; it merely constitutes a strong recommendation not
> > to use the character.