Re: [APTLD iname 24] Re: [idn] Proposed suggestions from AsiaPacific Top LevelDomain meeting

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

At 09:16 AM 3/4/00 +0800, James Seng wrote:
>But considering the principle, policy and layer 8, it is definately easiler if
>we dont do everything all at once.

We probably only have one shot at doing this, at least for the next five 
years. There will be massive complaints if we do IDNv1 now and then try to 
do IDNv2 in two years, particularly if v2 allows some characters not 
allowed in v1.

>Rather conflicting paragraphs dont you think?

Exactly.

>If some characters are disallowed, then it does not matter how much (or
>little) we have in the list. The algorithm is the same, only diff is how big
>the list/table is.

As long as there is an obvious set of characters for the list, we 
completely agree. "Non-alphanumeric ASCII" is easy to add to the list in a 
definitive fashion. "Punctuation" is much harder (outside of the ASCII 
range), especially because some new punctuation characters will be added in 
the future. The same is true for "symbols". Even "digits" gets tricky, 
because some cultures will want their own digits that look quite different 
than US-ASCII digits.

All these lists can be made (and then trivially combined into a single 
list), but it is not clear that we have the understanding of the character 
repertoire to do it ourselves. We know there will be a "reject" list 
(containing at least formatting characters, spacing, and "."), but how much 
time do we want to spend adding to it? For each type of character that we 
add to the "reject" list, is the value of eliminating them worth the work? 
Many people would like us to finish as soon as possible (like last year...).

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium