Re: [idn] Re: [JET-member 464] Re: Fw: Re: new membersinvitation

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

--On Monday, 29 October, 2001 09:26 -0500 Eric Brunner-Williams
in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net> wrote:

> It may not be apparent, but the question is SC/TC in the
> protocol or in some other mechanism, e.g., the way the UTC
> want it. Someone, you pick, wrote that this wasn't a technical
> question. I think that person erred.

The general question is certainly a technical one.  It is not
clear that it is in scope for the IDN WG (let me come back to
that in another note).  If it is within scope for the IDN WG,
then I believe solutions are not possible (i.e., not solutions)
unless they solve (or avoid worsening) some other problems,
which I've tried to outline in earlier notes.

However, if one says "we need to do this because otherwise we
have to do double (or more) registrations and those are too
costly", _that_ question is not a technical one, except, as I
suggested, it interacts with either registrar-registry protocols
(not in IDN's scope) or the registration and use of CNAME
records (not in IDN's scope, I think).

> I want my registries to interoperate with other registries,
> the point of an IETF, for things (labels, keywords, etc) which
> use code-points from a common reference that are associated
> with "CJKV".

Yes.  So do we all.  And?

> Everything else, with the exception of bidi, appears to be
> vastly easier.

Well, I think it depends on your perspective.  We have,
potentially, many nearly-equivalent problems with languages that
are written in multiple scripts or other variants: if we try to
match them correctly, we end up with side-effects in other
places.  The _users_ of those languages have been less present,
and less articulate, than those concerned about Chinese, and
there are certainly fewer of them than there are users of
Chinese (or other Han-based character sets), but the problem is
not, IMO, any easier.

    john