Re: [idn] opting out of SC/TC equivalence

[John C Klensin <klensin@research.att.com>]

--On Thursday, 09 August, 2001 11:44 -0400 Edmon
<edmon@neteka.com> wrote:

> Hi John,
> 
> I completely concur with you, perhaps you misunderstand my
> statement.  What I am saying is that if CNNIC believes that
> there is compelling user expectation within their registry to
> have SC=TC, then they should absolutely implement it.  

And they should somehow to contrive to be sure that no records
are cached outside China, where other rules would apply as a
query is applied to a cached record?   I continue to be afraid
that the choices are between 

	-- the whole DNS using the same procedures or
	
	-- fragmenting the network

Now, if CNNIC says, "ok, we are going to register only SC, and to
get TC translations, you need to use our translating software 
However, if you have client software that doesn't use our
translation software and tables, you had better make queries in
SC, and reverse mapping records are going to return SC no matter
what you do", that would work with your model.  But I haven't
heard from them going that route is an accceptable model.

> if another TLD say .tld believes that preserving TC/SC
> information is important, then they will have the option to do
> so. The registrant will always have the option to make them
> equivalent.

As I think others have pointed out, this works only if you assume
that TC/SC equivalence can be solved by exactly two
registrations, one of each.  As soon as there are combinations of
the two forms, the combinatorics get you in major ways.

> I also concur that IDN should strive to solve some language
> issues, however, I also think that it is the IDN
> "implementations" that should solve the problem and not the
> "core protocol" which we should concern ourselves with at this
> moment.

If language issues are left to "implementations", we almost
certainly end up with different implementations interpreting the
same string in different ways and resolving it to different
targets.  That is, in essence, the fragmentation problem.
 
     john