Re: [idn] copy & paste

["Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>]

James Seng wrote:
> 
> One of the interesting arguments on IDNA is on copy & paste. Although
> the general copy & paste problem is out of scope for the group,

You know, I never understood such a position. It is ridiculous that we can
bring an elephant into a room and then say it's not our problem. Of course
it's in-scope, at least as an open concern. We don't have to solve it but
we shouldn't try to ignore it.

> Assumption: Applications which runs on OS that have smart clipboard are
> likely able to copy & paste properly since the clipboard can do the
> neccessary transcoding between different encodings, native, UTF-8, ACE

Does anybody actually expect this to happen? Any clipboard that tries to
transliterate on-the-fly is doomed to failure. I mean, you couldn't even
copy-n-paste an example string with such a clipboard.

> Case 1: resolving works, display works.
> Case 2: resolving fails, display works on A1 but not A2.
> Case 3: resolving works, display works on A2 but not A1.
> Case 4: resolving works, display fail for both A1 & A2.
> 
> Is there anything else I missed?

Is this an exercise or is this to be used as proof of a point? I can think
of several other ways to analyze this if that's what you're looking for.
For example, Case 4 represents 100% of the current time data-point, will
reach 0% at or near infinity. Cases 2 and 3 will be dominant for some
period of time between now and infinity. One good question would be "when
does case 1 become majority?"

Also, case 2 is where the mandatory transliteration problem visibly
occurs, although case 3 probably has some interesting issues as well.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/