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

["Asmus Freytag (c)" <[e-mail]>]

On 12/8/2018 12:00 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:
>
> We were discussing Patrik’s document and what advice or rules to give 
> to Registrars about being conservative,
>
> And some questions about the motivation or intelligence of Registrars 
> and their Clients.
>
> It would help if the Registrars could pass off responsibility to their 
> Clients; the only reason not to do so would be that the clients 
> shouldn’t be expected to know the complex rules.
>
> The transcription problem is relatively easy to explain and 
> understand, and covers most other ways in which a name could be “bad”.
>
> These names don’t fall from the sky. Someone chooses them. Give them a 
> clear motivation.
>

The rules are complex even if the basic requirements can be stated simply.

The process of teasing them out for the 28 scripts that make up all but 
a miniscule fraction of modern use is progressing nicely, but including 
preparatory phases will probably have taken most of a decade before 
completion. (I'm referring to the Root Zone LGR program).

The good news is that the result of this effort will be well documented 
(linking the final design to the underlying details of the scripts and 
language use) and that it will also be available in a machine-readable 
format.

That means that for the first time, there would be a well-researched 
(and well-documented) starting point for anyone trying to create and 
enforce registry policies for pretty much any writing system used in 
daily transactions.

Policies for the second level would have to extend this template to 
allow digits and hyphen - and perhaps relax some other restrictions that 
are seen as relevant only to the root. This is a much smaller task than 
starting from scratch, but for some scripts, even that task is not 
entirely trivial.

Common to the rules for most of the scripts is that they define variant 
labels and the restrictions applicable to them (never allocatable to 
unrelated entities and most commonly the first allocated blocks all 
subsequent registrations of variants). Carefully designed to make 
indistinguishable or semantically equivalent labels mutually exclusive 
or reserved for a single applicant, these policies require access to a 
registry to implement. Only when you know what is allocated already can 
you evaluate whether a new label is a blocked variant.

Being machine readable should make it easy to integrate these rules into 
registry operations. Therefore, I'm a bit confused as to what would be 
gained by somehow distributing this responsibility down the chain - 
other than surfacing restrictions built into the registry to applicants.

A./