Update to clarify combining characters

[Cary Karp]

Quoting Martin:

>>> past century, in support of a local (to a zone) semantic, e.g.,
>>> equivalency of two labels, e.g., "ou.example" and "8.example" (or
>>> "wabanaki.example" and "8abanaki.example" and "ouabanaki.example"),
>>
>> Are there similar non-ASCII examples?
> 
> The case of simplified vs. traditional Chinese characters has been
> discussed at length (at length even for IDNA) leading up to IDNA 2003.
> There are many other scripts and languages where things like this can
> occur. English as used around the world is one of them; if you want
> color.example, you may want colour.example at the same time.

My question was specifically about Abenaki -- apologies for the lack of
clarity.

I was trying to determine if Eric was expressing concern about an issue
of immediate relevance to the IDNA protocol or if he was calling
attention a separate l10n problem that the protocol is not expected to
render tractable. However much the latter such things beset IDNA users
-- with colour vs color being a prime example -- I can't see anything to
do about them via an incremental protocol revision.

The real issue is the caution necessary to avoid undertaking any action
with potential for creating entry-level barriers to language communities
that have yet to articulate their interests.

> In TLDs, it might actually be easier to deal with such a case, because
> they can be dealt with on a one-by-one base. For an actual example,
> please see .中国 and .中國
> (http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/xn--fiqs8s.html and
> http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/xn--fiqz9s.html). Of course, it's
> not easy (in case it is desired) to
> keep such equivalents in sync (whatever "in sync" may mean).

The "in sync" question is central to the discussion of policies for the
management of TLDs with "variant" IDN labels, as well as for the second
levels of gTLDs that support code point repertoires where some code
points are regarded as variants of others. A lot of energy is being
focused on that in ICANN's VIP program, to which anyone with immediate
interest in that discuss should probably refer.

/Cary