The Future of IDNA

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:53:52PM -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:

> I'm not arguing this on security grounds. I'm arguing that the .gr
> folks have made reasonable requests to push the policy from the zone
> operator to the client, by IDNA protocol. And, since modern Greek is
> used in such a way that the .gr registry felt the need to bundle on
> the server side when the IDNA2003 protocol did not require mapping
> tonos on the client side, we should pay attention to their requests
> and try to fulfill them if at all possible. There may be requests from
> mathematicians or whoever to distinguish Final from Normal Sigma, but
> I don't accept that such requests are more important than those coming
> from the .gr folks. (Mathematicians or whoever are a "small"
> community, in my view.)

I agree that they're not _more_ important.  What I think you haven't
shown is that they're _less_ important.  I know that the .gr registry
has a problem here.  But people weren't arguing to get rid of the
mappings for the fun of it: there are problems with them (which I
think have been outlined at length.  If you think those arguments for
the problems are wrong, that's a different matter).  So unless we can
both solve all the problems that the elimination of mapping is
supposed to achieve too (and I haven't seen a way that that's supposed
to be solved, I think), then someone's going to lose.  

> And when they said that, we did not hear from any community, large or
> small, that they wanted to distinguish Characters with Tonos from
> Characters without Tonos.

This is a complete red herring, I think, because there are lots of
zone administrators in the universe who are paying exactly no
attention to the IETF.  Your argument above effectively gets us into
the codepoint-by-codepoint business, and if you ask me we don't have
the expertise for that.

A

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