I-D Action:draft-ietf-idnabis-mappings-00.txt

["Martin J. Dürst"]

Hello Pete,

On 2009/05/27 13:02, Pete Resnick wrote:
>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idnabis-mappings-00.txt
>
> Well, apparently like Hume's Treatise, it appears that my draft "fell
> dead-born from the Press; without reaching such distinction as even
> to excite a Murmur among the Zealots."
>
> Anyone else have a comment?

First impression: Long sentences, long paragraphs. I definitely suggest 
going through the document and try to cut all sentences so that they fit 
in two lines or less, as an editorial exercise independent of how the 
content is going to change.

Taking into the account that Section 3 and beyond are not yet worked out 
very much, I won't comment on these. Section 2 is called "Architectural 
Principles", which sounds good. But I have mostly found some general 
explanations of how user input works these days, some explanations about 
the history of IDNA and the differences between IDNA versions, and so 
on, nothing getting close to anything Architecturally.

One reading of the document suggests that the "mapping" happens when 
characters are input, e.g. from the keyboard. I think it would be a 
great contribution to text processing and internationalization on the 
planet if all data input happened to produce data in NFC. However, I 
unfortunately have serious doubts that this will happen, even if IDNA 
suggests it stronly (and even if we require it). For other kinds of 
mappings (e.g. mapping to lower-case), it would be complete havoc if it 
happened at user input. It would be impossible to type UPPER-case 
characters.

That shows that it is impossible to put the mapping at the point of user 
input (e.g. from a keyboard). It may work for the 'location' or 
'address' field in a browser, but not for editing a script or a settings 
file with a plain text editor.

Except for a lot of talk about keybords and the like, there is no 
discussion about where between the keyboard and the punycode conversion 
the mapping might happen. If some thought has been given to this, it 
should be included in the document. If not, somebody better start thinking.

detail:
"in order to draw a Latin small letter A ("a")": 'draw' should be 
replaced by 'input' or another more generic term.

Regards,   Martin.

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp