Re: [idn] Fw: Cyrillics - Latin

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 9:18 AM +0900 2/5/02, Masahiro Sekiguchi wrote:
>Then, what we need to make clear is the answer to a question:
>
>     Why is uppercase/lowercase issue that is unique to a
>     particular group of scripts covered in this group?

Very good point. I think we did have that justification in the 
distant past, but it was lost along the way. We will add it after the 
WG last call. The reason is that the current DNS has case-insensitive 
matching for current names; if we did not do that for the additional 
characters being added, you would get great user confusion. For 
example, "Abc" matches "abc", but "<Capital-A-with-accent>bc" would 
not match "<lowercase-a-with-accent>bc".

>Or, in other words,
>
>     Are there any reason we can't remove case mapping from
>     our spec?  (Other than something like "because it is a
>     natural English convention..." :-)

Yes, there is a good reason: removing the table would introduce confusion.

>Once some persuasive statements are included in our draft,
>most of complains (if not all) about lack of some language-
>dependent processing from our spec will disappear.

We only wish. :-) Note that the case conversion is not 
"language-dependent" or even "script-dependent": it was added for all 
scripts (which are used in many languages) that have standardized 
case conversions.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium