[precis] Emoji, Names and Normalisation

[Daniel Oaks <[e-mail]>]

Hey everyone,

I do work with the IRC chat protocol. Specifically, right now I'm doing
work around allowing proper Unicode support, and writing the casefolding
specs that would required to allow that.

My current solution is based on PRECIS, but I'm running into an issue and
not exactly sure how to solve it.

Essentially, we need to casefold 'nicknames' (usernames that clients are
referred to by), and for 'channel names' (chat room names). It would be
much preferred to use an *IdentifierClass* profile. Using a single profile
for both name types is also much preferred for reasons of implementation
simplicity and for other protocol reasons (while we can have different ones
for both if it's necessary, sticking to a single one would be much
preferred).

The only real profile out there which matches that description right now is
UsernameCaseMapped, which while does everything we want to for nicknames,
disallows emoji in channel names (which some services have already
knowingly allowed).

I haven't dived deep into Unicode and normalisation, but would there be a
way for an *IdentifierClass* profile to allow and appropriately normalise
emoji? If so, would the best thing for us to do here be to actually create
our own profile for IRC (channel) names? I'm wary of doing so seeing the
advice against profile proliferation here
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7564#section-5.1>, but given the
restriction it's difficult for us to adopt an *IdentifierClass* profile for
this without creating our own.

Any advice on what we should do here would be much appreciated. Thanks for
the work you've all done so far!

Regards,
Daniel Oakley