Re: [idn] Determining equivalence in Unicode DNS names

[Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net>]

At 11:57 AM 1/14/2002 -0800, Stuart Cheshire wrote:
>It seems to me that one of the great problems of IDN is one that is
>fundamentally unsolvable: an attempt to determine, once and for all
time,
>a single global set of rules for deciding if two strings are "equal" or
>"equivalent".


Is "abc" = "abc"?

Is "aBc" = "AbC"?

Is "abeesee" = "abc"?

These have easy answers, and they depend on well-understood types of
rules
for comparing strings.

The current DNS has rules that make the answers yes, yes, and no,
respectively.  The actual characters used are currently ASCII.  Extend
the
characters to be Unicode, and the same sort of rules can still be used,
albeit with some tuning.

The danger is with trying to solve a broader set of problems, or with
doing
tuning that is more like a major overhaul.

In other words, the task of IDN is entirely solvable, as long as we do
not
define the task to be too broad.

That is, for example, why equivalence between traditional and simplified
Chinese is entirely out of scope for this working group, just as trying
to
define equivalence between arabic and hebrew characters is out of scope.

d/


----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:dcrocker@brandenburg.com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.273.6464