"This case isn't the important one" (was Re: Visually confusable characters (8))

Vint Cerf vint at google.com
Mon Aug 11 16:47:37 CEST 2014


Amen to Andrew's basic point.

v



On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 10:42 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com>
wrote:

>
> On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 10:20:02PM -0700, Mark Davis ?️ wrote:
> > No knowledgeable person ever represented that NFKC would remove all
> > confusable characters.
>
> Even if I spelled that "NFC" to match what I wrote, I cannot see how
> you get from what I wrote to "remove all confusable characters".
> Nobody has suggested that is the goal, and I'm getting a little
> impatient with the tendency of some in this discussion to misrepresent
> what those of us who have a concern are saying.
>
> To state it again, my concern -- my only concern -- is that this
> addition to Unicode appears to be a case where a precomposed
> character, which was previously possible to create (for some value of
> "possible" and "create") with a combining sequence, is added without
> NFC causing the new character and the previous combining sequence to
> match.  That behaviour is surprising to me given what I understood at
> the time we worked on and published IDNA2008.  (It is in fact
> surprising to me even now when I read the text of the standard, but I
> understand the argument that in fact the new character is somehow
> unrelated enough to the former combining sequence that the combining
> sequence never really worked, but that doesn't matter.  I would
> probably find that argument more compelling if I understood why this
> case is different from ö in Swedish vs. ö in German, but never mind
> that, either.)
>
> What is important at least for me now is to understand the extent to
> which this sort of thing happens, what our expectation ought to be in
> the future about its recurrence, and what implications that has for
> how we build network protocols atop Unicode.
>
> Best regards,
>
> A
>
> --
> Andrew Sullivan
> ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
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>
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