standardizing on....

[Vaggelis Segredakis]

Dear Gerv,

I have participated on behalf of the Greek registry in the idna2008 protocol discussions and I have to say that your text below oversimplifies a complex situation.

I have personally raised many concerns about idna2008 on these discussions. Even today I find it worrying that we expect that the client software will transform capital letters to small, if at all they are accepted, and then it will proceed with the idna2008 translation. Will this ever really behave canonical? Will there be a standard way?

We, as a registry, faced some hard choices at that time. For sometime the final S letter was proposed to become an invalid character, leaving all male names in the Greek language misspelled in the url fields. We accepted the better scenario, maybe not the best possible solution but no other choice was offered. The idna2008 is a compromise between many expert's opinions, not something the registries commissioned or signed upon.

We agreed that to have the final sigma was a better way forward than not having it, although this fact would present compatibility issues that we did not ask for. We will try to mitigate all risks, educate the users etc. However, since the incompatibility was inevitable, if the question became "should we ditch idna2003 for something completely new instead of evolving it to something partially compatible", some interesting proposals appeared in the mailing list and could become a basis for this discussion but were rejected by most experts, in favor of maintaining *some* compatibility.

We would be happy to work with you or any other interested parties, to help mitigate any risk of using Greek character domain names, especially those containing the final sigma or typed in and translated from capital letters. Please feel free to contact me.

Kind regards,

Vaggelis Segredakis
Administrator of the .gr Domain Registry




-------- Αρχικό μήνυμα --------
Από: idna-update-request at alvestrand.no 
Ημερομηνία: 21/08/2013  20:50  (GMT+02:00) 
Προς: idna-update at alvestrand.no 
Θέμα: Idna-update Digest, Vol 67, Issue 4 
 


Message: 1
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 10:07:18 +0100
From: Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org>
To: "Jungshik SHIN (???)"  <jshin1987 at gmail.com>
Cc: Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>, Simon Montagu
<smontagu at smontagu.org>, "public-iri at w3.org" <public-iri at w3.org>,
"uri at w3.org" <uri at w3.org>, "idna-update at alvestrand.no"
<idna-update at alvestrand.no>, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at stpeter.im>,
Mark Davis ? <mark at macchiato.com>, Anne van Kesteren
<annevk at annevk.nl>, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com>, "www-tag.w3.org"
<www-tag at w3.org>
Subject: Re: Standardizing on IDNA 2003 in the URL Standard
Message-ID: <52148346.2030205 at mozilla.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

[I'm also not on many of these lists...]

On 20/08/13 15:46, Jungshik SHIN (???) wrote:
> 
> 2013. 8. 20. ?? 5:33? "Anne van Kesteren" <annevk at annevk.nl
> <mailto:annevk at annevk.nl>>?? ??:
>> Last I checked with implementers there was not much interest in that.

In the case of Mozilla, if it was something I said which gave you that
impression, I apologise. That's not correct.

> Chrome is interested. It is very long overdue.

We are also interested. Sticking with a single version of Unicode is
untenable; given that, implementing anything other than IDNA2008 would
just be some mish-mash which would behave differently to everyone else.
Our implementation was held up for quite some time by licensing problems
with idnkit2 (now resolved), and it's now held up (I believe) due to
lack of time on the part of the main engineer in this area. (Patches
welcome.) But, insofar as I have any say, we do want to move to
IDNA2008, perhaps with some compatibility mitigations from TR46. (We've
not yet developed a precise plan.)

With regard to any incompatibilities, particularly around sharp-S and
final sigma, my understanding and expectation is that the registries
most concerned with those characters (e.g. the Greek registry for final
sigma) were in agreement that IDNA2008 was the correct way forward, and
that any breakage caused by the switch was better than the breakage
caused by not moving. If I became aware that this was not the case, my
view might perhaps change. But I believe that it is. If there is a
phishing problem in any particular TLD due to this change, then I place
the blame for that squarely on the registry concerned.

This is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479520 .

Gerv


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