Re: [idn] Document Status?

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

The rarity of Dave's and my agreeing is again noted for the
record.  Lest we get too carried away by it, one observation
below.

--On Saturday, August 31, 2002 10:13 AM -0700 Dave Crocker
<dhc@dcrocker.net> wrote:

>...
> 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.
>...

Well, I think there is a problem that may border on
understanding, and it is tied up with my major personal
objection to the general style of the work that has come out of
the WG.  I believe that IDNA (and the supporting documents) are,
with the exceptions and qualifications Dave and I are pushing
on, a reasonably well-understood solution to _some_ problem.
I'm not sure I know what that problem is, who cares about it,
and whether it is important enough to justify changes to the way
the DNS works and is interpreted.  Re those changes, we can
debate how significant they will be, and there are differences
of opinion about who will be impacted and how much pain they
will feel, but I think it is relatively certain that the pain
level will be non-zero.

This is not a joke.  I know that the IDNA approach, with
adequate definition of the characters to be used, will permit
internationalization of low-level identifiers.  If that is all
we care about, then there is a case to be made that it is
actually more mechanism than is needed: if the same constrained
processes are to be used to access a name that cause it to be
created, than the subtle issues of character matching for
different codepoints may not be relevant.  By contrast, it is
clear that the WG has not solved (Dave would, I think, say that
it has no scope or charter to even examine) the set of questions
associated with accurate transcription of DNS names from other
environments and media.  It is equally clear that many people
are focused on that problem and won't consider any "DNS
internationalization" problem to be solved unless it has some
adequate resolution.

So I would [still] like to see a clear statement about what
problem the IDN WG's solution solves.

> 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.

I agree with this in principle.  I will agree in practice as
soon as someone tells me what "workable IDN" means, in precise
language, so that goal and the IDN WG solutions can be compared.
I'm sure that answer is clear to many of you, but it is not
clear in the documents -- to a greater or lesser degree, they
describe how to do something, but not, at a abstract level, why
one would want to do it--  and it is not clear to me (and I have
tried, very hard, to understand it).

    john