IAB Statement on Identifiers and Unicode 7.0.0

[Mark Davis ☕️]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 9:20 AM, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:

> I am reading your message as saying "ambiguity is ok if there are few
> instances of it" while some of us would like the handling of identifiers
> encoded with Unicode to be unambiguous.
>

The sense of "unambiguous" that matters to users is that when they read a
sequence of glyphs, their interpretation of the underlying character
sequence is correct (in normal environments, with common fonts).

That level of "unambiguous" was impossible, even before Unicode.

Take 8859-5, with both o and Russian o, or ASCII with "google.corn" vs "
goog1e.com". [Both the 1 and lowercase L are an issue, but also in many
fonts—in common use—users will read the (r + n) in the former as an m.]

To extend Andrew's death analogy, there is no way that we can all live
forever. However, there are clearly medical processes and social policies
that can improve and extend the years that we all have. But to be
productive, the focus needs to be on the big ticket items, and thus needs
to be prioritized by real data.

Mark <https://google.com/+MarkDavis>

*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/idna-update/attachments/20150128/2e672661/attachment.html>