Re: [idn] Re: Agenda Item for next UTC: Normalizing CaseMapping

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

It still sounds like you are describing pictographic synonyms. "Lightning" 
and "lightning with rain above" both *meaning* the same thing doesn't mean 
that there should be a way to convert from one to another automatically. As 
you have shown, that conversion is language- (and possibly local- ) specific.

The only place where I could imagine that this comes up is when you are not 
looking at the glyphs themselves. If someone says in Chinese "lightning dot 
com", then the person trying to use that domain name might not know which 
characters to use. But this is the same as saying "Dürst dot com" and the 
person not know if that was spelled Dürst or Duerst.

10646/Unicode define characters, not semantic meanings. There is some grey 
area there, but there may not be a good reason to expand that grey area. It 
sounds like an interesting and thorny research topic, but not one that has 
much chance of completing any time soon.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium