Re: [idn] upstream and downstream

["Adam M. Costello" <idn.amc+0@nicemice.net.RemoveThisWord>]

Erik van der Poel <erik@vanderpoel.org> wrote:

> > > I don't really know whether this kind of change is realistic.
> >
> > I think not.
> 
> Would you care to elaborate?

Partly because of the ransom-note problem, partly because of the
deployment problem (new ACE prefix), but even if we dismiss those,
there's still the problem of characters that are supposed to use
different glyphs that are only slightly different and therefore easily
confusable.  So we'd be paying a fairly high cost (changing Nameprep) in
return for a disappointing benefit.

> don't you think it's at least a little unfortunate that (a) Unicode
> chose to include duplicates and/or (b) nameprep chose to use Unicode?

See Doug Ewell's post about how there's no good place to draw the line
for what counts as a "duplicate".  I don't think a different string
preparation or a different universal character set could have made
the situation a lot better in this regard; the scripts and characters
themselves (independent of any encoding) have too many shades of
similarity and distinction.  We can't limit ourselves to a set of
clearly distinguishable characters (some registries can, but a browser
can't), so we need to resort to other approaches, like looking at the
combinations of characters.

AMC