Re: [idn] Document Status?

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

--On Monday, September 02, 2002 11:13 AM +0800 James Seng
<jseng@pobox.org.sg> wrote:

> This is really deja vu :)
> 
> To be even more precies, domain names don't deal with
> characters either. It deals with bits that represent
> codepoints, that may be grapheme that forms characters.

James, I was about to respond by saying "yes".   Then I realized
that this is actually an area of controversy, and one of the
sources of my "and what problem did you say the IDN WG solved?"
question.  Let me try to explain, in the unlikely event that it
is helpful...

The defining DNS documents, at least I read them, really do talk
about "characters".  That was, I think, largely because in ASCII
there are no composed characters (combining of two code points
to produce one character); there are no composite sequences to
make up phonemes or words (as in Hangul, at least as I
understand it); there are no diacriticals, no optional accent
marks or vowels, no peculiar spaces or breaks, and no alternate
(or multiple) codings for the same glyph.

I think your "bits that represent codepoints, that may be
grapheme that forms characters" definition may be an accurate
characterization of where we have ended up.  But I believe we
have ended up here more or less as an accidental sequence of
events, driven by the design work of a small number of people,
and without any explicit decision by the WG that this is what we
are doing.  And that, in turn, brings us back to one of the
issues Dave and I keep trying to raise, which is that the IDN
WG's output constitutes a (or several) significant change(s) in
how the DNS is used and interpreted, and we need to be very
explicit about those changes.

If one of them is that we have moved from "characters" to "bits
that represent...", then that is some that should be explicit.
And it isn't in any of the documents I've seen so far.

      john