Re: [idn] UTC recommendations on TC/SC

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

At 9:13 PM -0400 9/2/01, Eric Brunner wrote:
>In any event, I can't imagine how a conversation in a code-point standards
>body ended with a paraphrasing of "multiple (zone) registrations reasonably
>meet user requirements".

Others might not be as incredulous. As Mark said, there are 
essentially only two zone registrations, and that is really only 
needed for names where the user might do a traditional-to-simplified 
conversion.

>  It is as odd as an IETF conversation ending with
>the observation that "multiple code-point allocations reasonably meet the
>glyph <foo>'s requirements as a character in scripts <bar> and <baz>".

No, that is completely different. In the T-S case, the question is 
how might the user who does an inherent conversion be accommodated, 
and who will be doing the accomodating (the protocol or the zone 
holder); in the code-point case, you are not accomodating a user, and 
you are only making the change in the protocol.

>In this one note I'm troubled to see the UTC presume to know better than
>the sources available to the authors of tsconv, and to know better than
>the authors of some eventual STANDARD and/or BCP trace APPS or DNS IDs.

Why? The IETF looks to outside experts for advice, and I think it can 
reasonably be stated that the UTC are experts on Unicode. Until this 
WG, I had *never* heard anyone claim that a typical person in China 
would do a partial conversion of a name to a mixture of traditional 
and simplified. This is not to say that the CNNIC/TWNIC folks are 
wrong; they are clearly trying to make a strong case for helping 
native Chinese speakers more than the DNS ever has.

Questioning the UTC's expertise in scripts, and deferring instead to 
national name registries who have very different concerns, may make 
sense for a policy-based body like ICANN, but probably not for a 
standard-based body like the IETF.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium