Re: [idn] nameprep

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 9:21 PM +0000 6/1/01, Adam M. Costello wrote:
>Anyway, if nameprep is map->normalize->prohibit, that's equivalent to:
>
>     map
>     compatible-decompose
>     canonical-compose
>     prohibit
>
>We can still ask whether it would be convenient to swap the first two
>steps.  It would make the mapping table smaller.

What is your motivation here? The mapping table is quite small: it 
fits in about 4K of memory. Can you say how many entries would be 
saved, and why saving probably 1K of a table would be worth it? Given 
that many toolkits have a single step for normalization, having 
people split out the two steps for saving 1K of table space seems 
like overkill.

>Also, I continue to be nervous about inviting all the weird characters
>into domain names right away.

And others are nervous about us subsetting what should be allowed 
initially and allowing more in later. Transitions are hard to manage. 
(And calling someone's characters "weird" is also difficult for some 
of us.)

>People might want to look at
>ISO/IEC TR 10176:1998, or equivalently, Annex D of the C99 spec (ISO/IEC
>9899:1999), which lists the set of characters allowed in C identifiers.

And what do C identifiers have to do with it? We're talking about 
people's names, company names, product naems, and so on.

>Another set to look at is the name characters of XML, which are defined
>in terms of the Unicode character classes:

Same problem.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium