Matching and comparison

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

2.3 Matching and comparsion

I think you are trying to mandate case-insensitivity here. That's good
in theory and bad in practice for international characters. There are
examples of letters whose case conversion are different for different
written languages. If we want to require case-insensitivity, we
have to point to a single conversion table for all characters.

     On the other hand, similar glyphs given different codespace on a
     character set should be treated differently.
"Treated differently" is vague. It will get more vague if you allow
multiple character sets that have the "same" characters in them. I
suggest that the above be rewritten as "Canonicalization of characters
must follow precise and predictable rules."

     If a canonicalisation algorithm is proposed, the algorithm must be
     easily upgradable as new languages/writing systems are added.
I disagree. We can't have a moving target for canonicalization. It must
be fixed *before* any internationalization of the DNS occurs.


--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium