Re: [Idna-update] [Ext] FWD: Expiration impending: <draft-klensin-idna-rfc5891bis-01.txt>

[Asmus Freytag <[e-mail]>]

The emerging conclusion after a lot of back-and-forth among people with 
deep and very deep expertise in this area was the that the issue that 
caused the stall wasn't really new; that there are, sprinkled through 
the writing systems, a number of cases of characters of identical 
appearance that are not covered by normalization (with and without 
involving combining marks); that some of these cannot be easily 
mitigated by simple repertoire restrictions; and that, ultimately, there 
is a need to do additional due diligence at the registry policy level 
(or LGR level).

In many cases, using the variant mechanism (blocked variants) would be 
the appropriate remedy - but this is a tool not available to the IANA 
review.

In any case, there is little benefit in keeping the IANA tables stuck at 
Unicode 6.3.0 -- the number of pre-existing cases (going as far back as 
the earliest Unicode version covered by IDNA2008) definitely exceeds the 
expected incremental addition from pending versions of Unicode. And a 
comprehensive solution lies outside the methodology of property-based 
inclusion; however, the property-based IANA tables would make a solid 
base on which to implement additional mitigation.

Therefore, the rationale to maintain this process in a stalled state is 
tenuous at best.

What is needed is for someone to summarize the state of the discussion 
and give a public signal that updating the IANA tables is not causing 
irreparable harm and can therefore move forward.

Secondary to that is finding a way to communicate the to consumers of 
these tables that simply allowing all PVALID code points isn't a robust 
solution for many writing systems and additional due diligence needs to 
be preformed - for example along the same lines as is being done now for 
the Root Zone (which is quickly defining the state of the art in that 
respect).

A./



On 3/5/2018 11:15 AM, Kim Davies wrote:
> Quoting John C Klensin on Monday March 05, 2018:
>> Given that there has been no discussion of this draft in the
>> last few months, that there seems to be no interest in it in the
>> IESG (although we have not pressed hard on it specifically), and
>> that the possibly-complementary
>> draft-freytag-troublesome-characters draft has already expired,
>> I'm just going to let this expire unless someone gives me a good
>> reason why not in the next few minutes (if a revision is not
>> posted today, the draft will expire because, without special
>> permission, nothing can be posted between tomorrow and the start
>> of IETF).
>>
>> I hope no one interprets this as complete lack of interest in
>> pursuing IDN issues, or even clarification of the IDNA
>> standards, in the IETF.
> With the expiry of these efforts, I am concerned more generally that
> the standing IAB guidance in
> https://www.iab.org/documents/correspondence-reports-documents/2015-2/iab-statement-on-identifiers-and-unicode-7-0-0/
> has kept the pre-computed IDNA tables published at IANA downgraded
> to Unicode 6.3.0 for a number of years. It seems appropriate to revisit
> publishing tables against contemporary Unicode editions if there is no
> active work on publishing clarifying RFCs in this regard.
>
> kim
>
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