Re: [idn] Comments on IDNA/stringprep/nameprep

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

this is the kind of discussion that should be carried out in unicore and
not in idn, really.

-James Seng

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kent Karlsson" <kentk@md.chalmers.se>
To: <idn@ops.ietf.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 16, 2002 8:24 PM
Subject: RE: [idn] Comments on IDNA/stringprep/nameprep


>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> Paul Hoffman / IMC:
>
> > It seems a tad inappropriate for the IETF to consider not only going
> > against the Unicode standard but *also* against the desires of the
> > Korean national body to ISO because of the desires of a small number
> > of people who are neither representatives of standards bodies or the
> > national governments that are most interested in the script in
> > question.
>
>
> It seems to be much more than a tad inappropriate (for anyone) to go
> against the *design* of a script. Note that Hangul was really
designed,
> by a working group, resulting in a document describing the (then) new
> script.  So there is no after-construction involved when referring to
> "the design" here.  There have been some minor changes of use, like
> IEUNG as trail now stands for what YESIEUNG ("ng") used to stand for.
> But that does not affect the structure of the design.  See "The Korean
> Language" [1], section 6.3 gives an English translation of the
original
> description of the script design.  (Note that I'm not suggesting that
> YESIEUNG be folded to IEUNG, they are different letters, albeit
similar.)
>
>
> I think I know why the letter cluster characters were invented, and
> why one did not want them to be decomposed at the time: it has to do
> with collation.  But getting Hangul correctly collated *can and
> should* be done without resorting to these letter cluster characters.
> (There are several methods, irrelevant for this group.)
>
>
> Note that it is not entirely unusual for SC2/WG2 to go "against the
> desires of the NNN national body to ISO" that is asking for some
> rearrangement or precomposition of characters, referring said
> NB to 14651 for how to achieve correct collation order.
>
>
> For all other (alphabetic or syllabic) scripts we have that: same
> sequence of letters (including diacritics) = same "nameprepped" form =
> same "name"; indeed, for IDN we even disregard all case differences
> (for historic reasons; which we therefore must generalise; even
though,
> as has been pointed out, there are still some technical problems
> with that [Turkish, and Greek; dotted i and adscript iota...]).
>
>
> Now why should we in this instance at all regard multiple low
> level representations of exactly the ***SAME*** sequence of
> letters (and [tone] marks), according to the design, as being
> different?  They will not only look the same (if properly
> supported), they *ARE* the same, even if one representation
> uses letter cluster characters and the other does not.
>
>
> Kind regards
> /kent k
>
>
> PS
> Note still that this is very different from the SC/TC case where the
> spelling is different for the same words.
>
>
> [1] SOHN, Ho-Min, "The Korean Language", Cambridge University
>     Press, 1999.
>
>
> >
> > --Paul Hoffman, Director
> > --Internet Mail Consortium
> >
>
>