The Future of IDNA

[Erik van der Poel]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 9:49 PM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at shinkuro.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 07:22:47PM -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>> It is not a silly question. You are asking many modern Greek
>> registrants to feel the pain of bundling just because you want a few
>> classical Greek registrants to be able to register names with/without
>> tonos separately.
>
> Stop, please, right there.  I am very strongly opposed to any
> suggestion that this WG is in any way competent to evaluate the value
> of the competing interests of different groups of users.  What you're
> suggesting is that the people who are here and who have made a noise
> (one with which I have some sympathy and which I certainly understand)
> are more important than those from whom you haven't heard, so you're
> going to cut off an option for the second group in the protocol to
> make things easier for the first.

We have heard from the second group, via Ken. And, I'm not convinced
that we should leave tonos on the letters before registration for a
small group, that deals with classical text, in the DNS.

>> Under my proposal, the bundling would not be forever. It would
>> strictly be a transition tactic. Display would be achieved via
>> http://<domain-name>/idnproto.txt.
>
> To the extent I understand your proposal, I think that "transition"
> will last approximately until heat death of the universe or the end of
> the DNS, whichever comes first.

Let me point out that the IDNA2008 drafts currently suggest the same
tactics (bundling and multiple lookup). I don't think the author
expects those transitions to last until the heat death of the
universe.

>> Who is talking about mapping for simplified and traditional Han?
>
> Once you start picking linguistic winners in the IDNA name game, _you_
> are.

No, we only need to deal with actual requests, not hypotheticals.

>> > As Andrew pointed out, you make life easier for some, but you
>> > end up goring somebody else's ox.
>>
>> Would you rather cause pain for modern Greek users than
>> classical/polytonic Greek users?
>
> I would rather cause some pain to one group of users so that the other
> group can be accommodated _at all_, yes.

How far do you want to take that argument? Some of the French are
asking for Ecole.fr.

Yes, you have to draw the line somewhere. I just happen to draw the
line in a different place.

Erik