AW: Eszett and IDNAv2 vs IDNA2008

Shawn Steele (???) Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Fri Mar 13 21:25:35 CET 2009


> Second, your notes and comments keep assuming that "ss" and "ß"
> are simply different display forms of the same thing.  They are
> not.

My German is really bad, but I think I understand the difference.  Despite the difference, ss is sometimes used instead of ß, even in Germany where it is linguistically incorrect.  I believe there should be little difficulty finding both examples on street signs within Germany.

I certainly agree that if my name were spelled "Weiß", then I'd be pretty picky about not using "Weiss".  However if it were my business name, I certainly would want both Weiss and Weiß to go to my web server.  Same way I'd want bücher.de and bucher.de to go to the same place.  I think you'll find that many string comparisons would also return them as equal, particularly in German locales, even on differing OS's.

I am certainly not going to argue that words SHOULD be spelled with ss instead of ß.  Obviously that is wrong, or at least clutzy.  I do think that it is a subset of a bigger display problem.  None of the information about the mappings in IDNA2003 is retained.

How come nobody has insisted that fussball.de and fußball.de should be discrete names?  I'd be happier about ß being unique if there was a convincing argument for that.  If fussball should be treated the same, whether or not it is proper spelling, then making ß unique causes the same problem as the Greek Tonos does for Greek (and for that matter any of the umlaut characters in German).

For the record, I'm not arguing back-compat because I'm too lazy to fix IE7/IE8.  Were there no IDNA2003 I'd probably make the same arguments about ß.  Sure, it is not the same as ss, but it is related.

-Shawn





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