Re: [idn] An open letter to the IDN WG (long)

[Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net>]

At 01:15 PM 3/19/2001, John C Klensin wrote:
>--On Monday, 19 March, 2001 12:49 -0800 Dave Crocker
><dhc@dcrocker.net> wrote:
> > When computer engineers make wishful assertions about our...
>
>And that, to reprise part of our conversation in Melbourne, is
>why I believe a "grandmother test" needs to be applied to this
>work.  And Nameprep --and, more generally, the attempt to get
>words in free text to act as identifiers-- fails it.

you have perfectly telescoped the topic I was most concerned about in your 
own open letter:

         your note introduces feature creep

"The attempt to get words in free text to act as identifiers" is not a goal 
or requirement of the DNS.

It is therefore not a goal or requirement of internationalizing the DNS.

I fully appreciate the appeal and benefit with that goal, but it is not 
within scope.

Domain names sometimes seduce people into thinking that they represent 
words if free text, but that is not what they are.

         ***  And we have no need to expand domain names to be words in 
free text  ***

It is one thing to deal with a "coding" limitation and fix it, that is, to 
move from ASCII as the end-user string to an international range of 
characters.  It is an entirely different thing to try to change the 
philosophy and semantics of the domain name "type".

Even grandmothers can learn cryptic syntax, though it is not reasonable to 
force them to learn different character sets.

There is always a balance to seek and, yes, we need to be very careful 
about the burden we place on grandmothers.  However they learn postal codes 
and telephone numbers.  And all the evidence is that they learn URLs 
reasonably well.  Domain name restrictions fall well within that scope of 
restrictions.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker   <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking   <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel: +1.408.246.8253;   fax: +1.408.273.6464