Re: [idn] hostname history hell

["Tim Langdell" <tim@xtns.net>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "John C Klensin" <klensin@jck.com>
To: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>
Cc: "IDN" <idn@ops.ietf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 2:38 PM
Subject: Re: [idn] hostname history hell


> --On Tuesday, 20 November, 2001 15:52 -0600 "Eric A. Hall"
> <ehall@ehsco.com> wrote:
>
> > John C Klensin wrote:
> >
<snip>
>
> * prohibit, in the spirit of the hostname rules, all
> symbol and drawing characters
>
> We don't _need_ them for identifiers.  Some of them will, sooner
> or later, run up against a legitimate command language or cause
> "interesting" lexical parsing problems (even if they don't cause
> problems in today's URI syntax definition).  High risks,
> marginal benefit.
>
> Just my opinion, of course, but I have these scars...
>
>     john

I am in substantial agreement with you John except I think on this issue of
symbols and drawing characters. Our market research shows that there is
going to be a high degree of demand for such characters. Further, with the
wide range of scripts and characters supported by Unicode, for many it will
be a rather academic hair-splitting which is a language script/character and
which is technically a symbol or drawing character.

Tim