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Re: [idn] Moving the IDN RFCs from Proposed to Draft Standards

Paul,

I have delayed writing this note in the hope that someone else would take the lead -- I'm tired of being the bad guy with regard to IDNA, which I basically support. But a number of conversations during the last week have convinced me that it is important that something be said, so, two issues:

(1) It was my understanding of the agreements when the IDN documents were approved that, when they went to Draft, the Draft versions would incorporate a better statement of applicability and scope than the original versions and, in particular, would incorporate the gist of the "IESG Statement" on IDN applicability and missing pieces. That agreement does not appear to be reflected in the text of the new drafts.

(2) Efforts to deploy IDNs seem to be hitting some user problems as those users see more of punycode then makes them happy. Of course, for many end users, seeing punycode at all, ever, is too much. Since the purpose of IDNA is to deliver native-text characters to end user applications and the presentation to the user, there is a case to be made that the "interoperable implementations" condition needs to be demonstrated with actual, end-user-oriented, applications that deliver non-ASCII characters to users. That is, interoperability between test environments that can demonstrate the ability to prepare, code, and decode strings is not sufficient to demonstrate that interoperable and conforming implementations are possible. I can't tell from the IDNConnect "final report" whether that stronger condition was met by those programs but, if it was not, some serious community discussion on this issue is probably in order.

regards,
    john



--On Thursday, 09 October, 2003 13:21 -0700 "Paul Hoffman / IMC" <phoffman@imc.org> wrote:

Greetings again. Patrik, Adam, Marc and I have made editorial
revisions to the RFCs in a new series of Internet drafts. The
announcements for those drafts came out recently; the
following four messages include a summary of the announcements
plus the list from each Internet Draft about what changes it
makes to the corresponding RFC. Note that none of the
protocols were changed: all the document changes were for
clarification based on comments we have received over the past
six months, plus a few minor editorial changes. That is, an
implementation of the old RFC should work the same under the
new RFC.

Comments on the individual drafts are appreciated.

BTW, the second part of moving RFCs from Proposed to Draft
Standard involves finding two or more independent
interoperable implementations of the standard. We believe that
we found many during the IDNConnect event (see
<http://www.idnconnect.jdna.jp>) a few weeks ago, and we'll be
making a full report on this soon.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium