The Future of IDNA

Erik van der Poel erikv at google.com
Fri Mar 20 01:08:43 CET 2009


>> > 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.
>>
>> We have plenty of Unicode and language experts on this mailing list.
>> Don't you think someone would have spoken up if they thought that
>> mapping tonos away is a bad idea?
>
> O.k., I'm a Unicode and language expert on this mailing list. *I*
> think mapping tonos away in the protocol is a bad idea. That is
> the kind of equivalencing that *should* be done by bundling
> (if required).

Do you have first-hand experience with the difficulty of bundling?

> It goes even *further* down the path of
> mapping (and in this case, is even a language-specific mapping)

Note that I am not recommending language-specific mappings in contexts
where the language is not known.

By the way, what languages require the separate registration of names
that differ only in the presence or absence of tonos? And how large
are those communities?

Also, note that even if you cannot register tonos/tonos-less names
separately under my proposal, you can display tonos via
http://<domain-name>/idnproto.txt.

> than IDNA 2003, so would introduce an interoperability problem
> with IDNA 2003 in the *opposite* direction of the current
> situation of not providing even any mappings to match what is done
> in IDNA 2003.

Yes, it is in the opposite direction, and I have outlined a transition
strategy for adding or removing mappings. Is the strategy unclear?
Should I provide more details?

Erik


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