Re: [idn] nameprep

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org> wrote:

> > 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?

Every now and then people find it necessary to go through lists of
Unicode characters manually and think about each one, like whether
some policy or algorithm under consideration will correctly handle
it.  Similarly, I expect that people will occasionally go through the
nameprep mapping rules and think about how each rule will interact with
other things (like keyboard input methods or other mappings to/from
other charsets).

> And others are nervous about us subsetting what should be allowed     
> initially and allowing more in later. Transitions are hard to manage. 

That's a good point.

> (And calling someone's characters "weird" is also difficult for some
> of us.)

I had in mind things like:

Letterlike Symbols
Number Forms
Arrows
Mathematical Operators
Miscellaneous Technical
Control Pictures
Optical Character Recognition
Enclosed Alphanumerics
Box Drawing
Block Elements
Geometric Shapes
Miscellaneous Symbols
Dingbats

AMC