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Re: [idn] Document Status?



John's comments were so nicely done, the only reason I am responding is because he cited me a number of times and seemed to be seeking some confirmation about those citations. (And, of course, I will fail to limit myself to those citations...)


At 05:06 AM 8/31/2002 -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
It seems to me that Dave (and I) have raised two sorts of issues
which are very different in character than, e.g., bidi and
unicode 3.2.   One has to do with the _style_ of the documents,
e.g., to paraphrase Dave (I hope accurately), whether they
specify a protocol or outline an implementation.
correct.


(i) If there is any question at all about how a given codepoint
...
(ii) If there is a substantive claim that the document cannot be
implemented in an interoperable way without out-of-band
profiling or oral tradition --and I think Dave has made exactly
that claim, although in different language-- then either

        * the document must be fixed to reflect that fact (and,
...
        * the document must be fixed to eliminate the ambiguity/
...
        * the documents should be published as Experimental, not
...
        * someone needs to come up with a persuasive case that
        Dave (and I) have misread and misinterpreted the
        document.  And, procedurally, I believe that case needs
Yes, these are the set of available choices.

Personally, I believe that publishing as Experimental is unnecessary and that it would be disastrous.

Experimental makes sense when a technology is not well understood. That is not the problem, here. The problem, here, about making difficult decisions, not about understanding them.

The current specification has not made at least one essential, difficult decision. As a consequence, someone registering an IDN for use with email or the web cannot know the correct set of characters available to them.

The Internet needs workable IDN now. (Actually, it needed it a few years ago.) So, we need to make the difficult decisions, to make IDN workable. And we need to publish as Proposed.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker <mailto:dave@tribalwise.com>
TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com>
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