Unicode 5.2 -> 6.0

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 04:41:18PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:

> extent of the tree.  The meaning of "registry" in IDNA2008 (and
> similar terminology in IDNA2003) extends to every zone
> administrator of a zone in the DNS.  In principle, the
> administrator of a subdomain somewhere deep in the DNS tree
> could have chosen to utilize one or more of these characters
> without having to discuss that decision with anyone else.

This is true.  On the other hand, _today_, given where we are in the
IDNA2008 deployment, it's perhaps a reasonable plan to ask registries
we know how to reach (i.e. the ones participating in ICANN processes).
For in this case, I'm unsure what to do.

If we were much further along and had any evidence at all of
widespread use, I'd be pretty concerned.  As it is, it seems to me the
best we can do for this particular case is ask everyone we know, and
hope hard we get it right.  But at least we're in quite early days.
We won't have this luxury when we go from Unicode 6.x to 7.x, I
suppose.

I dimly recall taking minutes in one of the IDNABIS meetings in which
I formed the impression that people thought it unlikely stuff would
move from PVALID to DISALLOWED.  I guess my impression was wrong?  For
if this is going to be a regular problem in future, it seems like one
would be better to have some new class like PROBABLY-PVALID where
characters we're not sure about live for a couple releases of the
Unicode tables.  That feels like second-guessing Unicode, however, and
we were trying to get out of that game.

A


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