Re: [I18nrp] Last Call: <draft-faltstrom-unicode11-05.txt> (IDNA2008 and Unicode 11.0.0) to Informational RFC

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, December 7, 2018 11:28 -0800 Larry Masinter
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> The reason for emphasizing transcription is not that there
> aren't other operations that are possibly more frequent
> (copy/paste a URL from one context to another, remember on a
> bookmark list) but rather that transcription is the most
> stringent requirement – if a user can transcribe a name
> resulting in the same sequence of Unicode codepoints, then
> they can display the name, distinguish the name from other
> (transcribable) names. 

Larry, I hope Asmus will respond further to this because he is
far more expert on relevant issues across a very wide range of
scripts and writing systems than I am, but I don't believe what
you write above is true.  Some scripts --of which the Roman
Script (Basic Latin of some millennia ago) is a good example--
simply have characters that are more easily distinguishable from
either other by people who cannot actually read the script or
associated language(s) that others.  Put a hypothetical person
who has never seen either before in front of a short string of
characters in that script and in front of a script written with
connected characters, complex use of ligatures, and subtle
distinctions among characters (look at Arabic digits for two and
three for an example of what I mean by "subtle" ... or look at
"O" and, in many contemporary type designs, "Q").  Then supply
that person with character pickers for the two scripts.  You
would almost certainly get accurate transcription of the Roman
characters and probably would not get it with the other script.
In neither case would be ability to transcribe imply the ability
to render and display (I'd encourage observation of five and six
year olds learning to write), nor would it imply that ability to
accurately copy and paste.

So, ability to transcribe may be a useful goal, but it isn't,
IMO, close to Patrik's global requirements list.  

best,
   john