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Re: [idn] case folding
- To: "Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@acm.org>
- Subject: Re: [idn] case folding
- From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>
- Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 14:47:30 +0200
- Cc: idn@ops.ietf.org
- Delivery-date: Wed, 31 May 2000 05:55:10 -0700
- Envelope-to: idn-data@psg.com
At 08:39 31.05.2000 -0400, Brian W. Spolarich wrote:
> I guess I'll be a contrarian today.
welcome to the club!
> In looking over the RFC index, I see a lot of examples of protocols that
>tend towards case-insensitivity as the default for comparisons. These
>protocols also tend to do this in the context of plain ASCII characters
>(i.e. LDAP v3, RFC2251). I haven't seen a lot of examples of
>case-insensitivity in larger character sets, precisely because of the
>complexity involved that we're talking about here.
the least unreasonable treatment I know of in an IETF protocol is one shown
in ACAP, RFC 2244, section 3.4, which defines an extensible set of
"comparator" functions. An UNICODE-TR21 comparator might be an useful addition.
I believe the inspiration came from LDAP, which, however, ties the
comparator to the datatype.
> What problem does case folding solve? Is it reasonable for protocol
>users to expect that MYDOMAIN.COM and MyDoMaIn.CoM are semantically the
>same, and therefore the protocol should understand that? While there is a
>backward compatibility requirement for US-ASCII, is it truly the case that
>users of the IDN will so strongly expect this behaviour that it becomes a
>requirement? Is it possible to come up with a case-folding implementation
>that is going to satisfy the behavioural expectations of the large
>majority of the users? I am mostly ignorant of these issues as they apply
>to the the vast majority of languages, but given the issues that have been
>raised here, I have to wonder if this is practically achievable.
I too wonder.
Harald
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no