High-level comment on TR46

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Tue Oct 27 17:27:43 CET 2009


I'd rather not have what I need to do for mappings split in 2 different places.  I also cannot impliment IDNA2008 until the standards are in place.  

It seems that doing the 2nd step as an RFC would take quite some time considering that the problems with special cases were already raised in this forum in the last year and have not been addressed.

-Shawn

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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:04:39 +0900
From: "Martin J. D?rst" <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>
Subject: High-level comment on TR46
To: "idna-update at alvestrand.no" <idna-update at alvestrand.no>,
        "public-iri at w3.org" <public-iri at w3.org>
Message-ID: <4AE6C5B7.2070107 at it.aoyama.ac.jp>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Hello Mark, others,

I have been thinking a bit more about TR46
(http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr46/) and all the connections.

I think TR46 on a high level does try to do two things:

- Provide a well-defined mapping for domain names. I think the Unicode
consortium is the best place to actually do this, and personally I can
easily imagine that some IETF (or W3C) specs may refer to it.

- Try to "fix" some perceived problems in IDNA 2008 and between IDNA
2008 and IDNA 2003 (mainly sz, final sigma,...). While the intent here
is very well-meant, and what's proposed is definitely one possible
solution, from an IETF perspective, the Internet (and the use of IDNs)
is far wider than browsers and search engines, and it is highly
desirable for all parties involved if a solution to these problems comes
directly from the IETF.

My proposal would therefore be to split the document, e.g. as follows:
- Keep TR46 with the uncontroversial mappings (essentially the extension
of the IDNA 2003 mappings to the IDNA 2008 repertoire)
- Submit the proposal for how to deal with both IDNA 2003 and IDNA 2008
at the same time, and in particular how to deal with the special cases
(called "deviations" in TR46) as an Internet-Draft (best with some
co-authors from other affected communities, e.g. from DENIC,...). That's
the best way to get the IETF to actually face the issues.

This is a 'refinement' from what we discussed with Larry about two weeks
ago in Mountain View.

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


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