Re: Layer 2 and "idn identities" (was: Re: [idn] what are the IDN identifiers?)

["Maynard Kang" <maynard@pobox.org.sg>]

Bruce Thomson wrote:
> Sorry, I confused you by carrying my conversation with Liana over 2
> posts. I was not indending to say that the two forms of egg in Japanese
> corresponded to an SC/TC equivalence. I was responding to
> Liana's proposal(?) that the 4 forms of "wind" in Chinese (2 SC,
> 2 TC) be treated as equivalent. If you are going to do that,
> logically the same thing should be done for Japanese. There are
> some cases with semi-obsolete characters where such equivalences might
> be useful, but the whole issue is quite complex, poorly defined, and
> might actually be objectionable to many users in my opinion.

I guess that is the main difference - SC/TC equivalence is not at all
objectionable to Chinese users in my opinion. In fact, it is a feature that
some Chinese expect to be naturally present in a naming system.

If I read you correctly, the same cannot be said for Japanese.

> SC/TC equivalence itself is far simpler than the "four winds, two eggs"
> equivalences, and has quite a bit of merit. I won't express any
> real opinion on it until I study it further.

It is not so simple as to be able to be done _accurately_ by an code-based1-1
bit-string matching process. There are semantic, syntactic and contextual
considerations that require at the very least a morphological analysis process
in order for TC/SC to be done with a reasonable amount of accuracy (i.e.
orthographically).

A good starting point for further understanding TC/SC is
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-cjk-01.txt and Jack
Halpern's C2C article (http://www.basistech.com/articles/C2C.html).

> By the way, both forms of egg I was referring to are Kanji. There
> are of course additional kana forms. I doubt any Japanese user
> would want to treat Kanji and kana as equivalent at the domain
> name level. As usual, I am counting on Yoneya-san to keep me
> honest when I make statements like this.
>

I seem to recall Yoneya-san saying something to the effect of "no
canonicalization should be done for Japanese" back at the Adelaide meeting. I
might have remembered wrongly though.

regards,
maynard