Re: [idn] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-idn-vidn-00.txt

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

This document has a patent statement at the end of the document, but 
nothing appears in the IETF IPR directory for it. If they haven't 
already done so, it would be a good first gesture for the authors to 
follow RFC 2026 and put their statement in the IETF repository.

As a second comment, please note that there is wide disagreement 
about any single method for phonemic transformations from other 
languages to English. This document specifically covers Korean, for 
which there are at least two different romanization schemes in 
current use. For a perfect example of this, one of the contributors 
to this working group offers two different romanized spellings of his 
last and first names:

GIM Gyeongseog
KIM Kyongsok

The draft proposes that every possible romanization using each 
possible phoneme be kept by the authoritative DNS server, and only 
one combined romanization can be returned. This assumes that the 
complete set of romanization tables is known today, and that the set 
will never grow. Both of these assumptions may be incorrect.

Further, there is the legacy problem. For example, both kim.com and 
gim.com exist today. Even if the romanizaiton table problem can be 
solved, the names returned would have to be different than current 
names. Maybe the authors could use a prefix hack similar to the ones 
the ACE authors have saddled ourselves with.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium