Re: [I18nrp] Confusion among characters and strings

[Asmus Freytag <[e-mail]>]

On 10/16/2018 7:14 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
> So, where I think we differ is how much beyond IDNA2008 it is
> worth going with guidelines of various sorts.   I wouldn't say
> "zero", but, for the reasons above, I wouldn't go very far.  I
> think Asmus would go much further and, if I were considering
> this only on technical and linguistic grounds, I would probably
> agree with him.

My take is based on the understanding that almost nobody is able to
understand the writing system issues (or issues at the intersection of
writing system and encoding) for *all* or even *most* modern scripts.

The root zone LGR project required about 10-40 people per script and
has taken about 8 years today, if you count the precursor phase.

Some ccTLDs may be able to muster such resources, but ordinary gTLD
operators trying to offer broad support of IDNs are in a tough position
and could benefit from either "minimal standard or best practices".

The former should be very focused and are perhaps what you were
thinking of above. The latter should be styled along the lines of:
"if you allow X, the consequence is that neither users nor rendering
systems for that script will be able to process it." and similar statements
of documented facts and suggested decisions (with supporting rationale).

We are very big on insisting on a documented rationale for all elements
of a root zone LGR; if any of these were to be expanded into "best practice"
documents, I would expect that feature to continue.

The world of writing systems is pretty complex; this complexity is
also "irreducible". There is no Gordian knot solution to "make it all
simple".

That said, applying certain limits on repertoire can often dramatically
simplify issues for a given script. Take disallowing combining marks
for Arabic. Turns out they are not essential for mnemonics in that
script (unlike, say, support for arbitrary types of text) and leaving
them out sidesteps a number of other issues.

A./

A./