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

["James Seng/Personal" <jseng@pobox.org.sg>]

Liana,

I think you are way out of line here so please drop that line of
argument, especially one which get personal.

You may be frustrated at a evil that does not exist. I shall try to
summaries what John's email to Deng few months back said, hope that
will help you understand the IETF.

To get IETF interested in a solution, there are typically two step.
1. Conviencing the IETF it is a worthwhile problem to solve
2. Presenting the solution to the IETF

For TC-SC, I think the group is pretty much convienced of the problem
and something we should at least attempts to solve. We already cross
that barrier. Any further examples of why TC-SC should be solved etc
would only frustrate others who is already in part 2 of the problem, ie
finding the solution.

Any analogy of other scripts to TC-SC is never going to be accurate,
whether you use Latin + Armeniam, or Japanese, or anything. Human
language by definition is complex, that makes our job even harder, and
each language is unique in its own way. In this sense, actually Michel
has a point, more than you care to admit.

Going back to our topic of the two step, given that the group is in part
2, what we need are proposed solutions. And so far, I dont think the
group here is convienced of any solution is worthwhile to pursue.
Sometimes we may have to say, "Sorry it is not possible to be done with
the existing technology we have now" even though we may agree with part
1.
Repeating part 1 again and again will not help anything because we
already
convienced of it, just not part 2, the solution.

To give you an analogy (one that is harder to dispute of course :-),
when IDN first started, we always on a basis that the group may declare
"no solution" as the conclusion. In fact, we may jolly well still do so
now, ie, we declare "no solution".

And to give you another example of the 2 step process, reordering is one
which we have a reasonable solution (part 2). Unfortunately, the group
here is not convience at the problem it solves is worth solving (part
1). In IETF, this is typically known as "solution looking for a
problem".  Therefore, do we still keep reordering in the pool in hope
that there will be a "problem" which will crop up in the future, or lets
drop it? It is a question the group have to ask ourselves.

-James Seng

> > (PS I should add that I am also a Unicode technical director and the
> > project editor for ISO 10646)
>
> Now, I got it.  So,  I particularly think that because you are
> not an DNS expert, and you are not using IMEs to select
> codepoins to express yourself much either, that there are
> other dimensions you should look into, before you make
> accusations like
>
> >And finding any similiarities between Latin
> > characters and Armenian characters is a far fetched example.