Standardizing on IDNA 2003 in the URL Standard

[Simon Josefsson]

Anne van Kesteren <annevk at annevk.nl> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 11:36 AM, Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> wrote:
>> On 16/01/14 11:17, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>>> It's not worse if it's fully backwards compatible and mostly
>>> interoperable across all major clients. At that point the standard is
>>> just wrong.
>>
>> And having a standard fixed to Unicode 3.2 is not also "just wrong"?
>
> The point is that in practice, it isn't fixed to Unicode 3.2. I have
> yet to encounter an IDNA2003 implementation that does that.

GNU Libidn fixes the Unicode tables to Unicode 3.2.  Even to the point
that I don't include the PR29 "fix" to the NFKC algorithm that came
later, because that would break the letter and spirit of IDNA2003, see
for example:

http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/manual/libidn.html#PR29-discussion

However there is nothing that prevents anyone from proposing an update
to IDNA2003 that uses a newer (but also hard-coded) Unicode version.
The IDNABIS WG chose not to go down that route, though, so it may be
hard to gain consensus around that approach, but IDNA2008 adoption seems
to (IMHO) be marginal, inconsistent and insufficient so there may be
room for re-consideration.

/Simon