[idn] Re: Fwd: Unicode letter ballot

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no> writes:

> --On mandag, november 25, 2002 13:10:39 +0100 Simon Josefsson
> <jas@extundo.com> wrote:
>
>> This message seems important for IDN.
>>
>> Note that if option A win the vote, it seems that stringprep/nameprep
>> will have to fork the Unicode standard to remain backwards compatible
>> when stringprep/nameprep updates its Unicode reference.
>>
>
> sigh.... all 5 are beyond-BMP characters added recently.
> if we could go back in time, we could have implemented a policy of not
> accepting characters as stable before 2 unicode versions had gone
> by....
>
> proofreading takes time.

Even two Unicode releases doesn't guarantee that the tables are
correct.  The only proper solution I can see is to stop modifying
published decomposition tables.  When mistakes are discovered, new
character codes with proper decompositions should be added and the old
character codes declared obsolete -- which is option B in the vote,
but unfortunately neither IDN nor IETF has any voting powers (which
suggest a methodological problem).