IAB Statement on Identifiers and Unicode 7.0.0

[Shawn Steele]

> This is getting tedious.  Vint has explained, Andrew has explained, Pete has explained, Patrik has explained, and I have explained, each in different ways (and my apologies to anyone I've left out), that the examples in the IAB statement are not the problem.  

Sorry, I didn't mean to be particularly tedious.

> The thing that is producing this very high level of concern is a belief that we designed the rule and property structure of IDNA on the basis of a series of assumptions, one of which was that NFC would resolve virtually all of the different ways of coding a single grapheme cluster within a given script (see Andrew's note and others for the relevant disclaimers).  We did not make that assumption up but were advised that things worked that way.
Another was that the guidelines and stability rules in the standard could be taken seriously, another subject on which we received strong advice.

And (not me), but many of the UTC have explained.  Those on this end feel that the discussion is also tedious, albeit in the other direction ;-)

> If those assumptions are seriously wrong and correspond to real-world cases, then we need to do something about it.

I don't think they are wrong.  NFC provides strong language that says that no new mappings will be added.  So there cannot be future additional ways to encode the same "grapheme cluster".  I'm not sure that the term is actually what you intend to describe.

> both lists include deciding that the problem really isn't worth dealing with, but that needs to be a decision.  

That is the appropriate behavior.

> It is what do to about apparent defects in the IDNA rule and derived property structure.

I see no defects.

>  The document essentially consists of two parts.  One explains the problem.  

Which presumes there is a problem.  I, and others, don't see a problem.

The reason why I tried to narrow down other examples is because you are seeing a problem where I don't see a problem.  So I'm trying to understand where the problem is.  

-Shawn