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

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

Jonathan,

If we were discussing standardizing the Korn Shell (or any other command
line interface for which 101-key keyboard input was the prevailing form
of I/O), and at some point in time some of "us" standards body participants
started working on standardizing a GUI's layout, that would be moderately
distracting. What would be awkward-or-beyond is if the GUI-concerned were
not sufficiently self-aware to disambiguate the activity they adopted, from
the activity they were, and presumably the rest of us still are engaged in.

A more useful, though perhaps not as positive a rephrase, is that attempts
to transform an identifier scheme into an opportunistic non-universal, or
into a universal, linear glyphic scripting substrate, capable of supporting
directory operations or regular (and fully i18n!!!) expressions or fonting
or fuzzy meaning is a task several linguistic bodies have shown a longer,
and brighter light upon than the majority of the IETF.

Grandmothers, apocryphal and aboard trollys garnished with enigmatic hoardings
in arcane scripts, possibly Klingon (Old High Archaic form, naturally), are
not authoring the requirements spec(s), and I wish they'd stop attending the
IETF and move over to Adobe FrameMaker or Microsoft Word or Direct Marketing
Association or Internat Advertising Bureau mailing lists, or if intellectually
inclined, to any of a number of linguistic or typographic association mailing
lists.

Now, could you offer to host a _seperate_ mailing list for people keen to
work on system representation problems? That would be positive.

Cheers,
Eric 	(member, SSILA, www.ssila.org, 
	 ex-member, DMA, www.the-dma.org, aka "Direct Marketing Association",
	 ex-member, IAB, www.iab.net, aka "Internet Advertising Bureau")

P.S. There are two (2) entities using the 3-letter-acronym "IAB". They should
     never have overlapping memberships, especially not now, though there is
     no reason why both can't be simultaniously represented in ICANN.