Re: [precis] WGLC: draft-ietf-precis-framework-09.txt

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

On 10/07/2013 04:21 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> On 2013/10/05 12:07, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 03:46:03PM +0900, Yoshiro YONEYA wrote:
>>> The WGLC will end on Wednesday, Sep 11th.
>>
>> On the principle of "better late than never", I at last got to this
>> document.  Many apologies for taking so long.
>
> I was just starting reading the document yesterday, so same applies here.
>
>
>> There was one largish issue that troubled me.  The discussion in 9.5
>> basically talks about the risks from enormous character repertoires,
>> and I wondered whether people won't start asking for a way to
>> negotiate locale or something similar as a mechanism for narrowing the
>> choices.  Certainly, something along these lines has been requested
>> (not to say "vehemently demanded") over and over for IDNA.  In IDNA
>> it's completely impractical, owing to caches, the need for
>> compatibility with existing DNS stuff, and so on.  It strikes me as
>> pretty impractical here, too, but I thought I'd raise it if only so we
>> can put it down.  (I'm also aware that it's pretty late in the game to
>> suggest this.  Why it only struck me today I don't know.  I have a dim
>> memory of having discussed this once before, but I didn't find
>> anything in the archive.)
>
> I'm not yet at 9.5, but I definitely agree with Andrew. Let's make 
> sure we put a very big nail through that coffin (or whatever the 
> correct idiom is).
>
>
>> The paragraph in section 3.1 starting, "Although members of the
>> community discussed the possibility of defining other PRECIS string
>> classes " read oddly to me.
>
> Same here, but for different reasons. The WG is publishing a document 
> with user name and password profiles at (roughly, at least?) the same 
> time as this one. Why are we saying "two is enough" but then doing 
> more? Maybe the user name/password ones aren't classes, or whatever, 
> but a slight rewording would go a long way here to help avoid the 
> impression that the WG is at odds with itself.

That raises the question of whether our layering of classes and 
subclasses and profiles is really all that helpful. During the NEWPREP 
BoF, we had fairly strong agreement that we wanted to define a very 
limited number of classes (say, two or three) that could be re-used by 
application protocols. At the least, I think we need to more clearly 
describe the relationship between classes and profiles. I'll look at the 
existing text and propose better text on the list.
> Something else occurred to me yesterday: Is PRECIS dealing with 
> context-dependent characters (ZERO WIDTH JOINER/ZERO WIDTH NON 
> JOINER,...)? IDNA2008 deals with them, but while a lot of other stuff 
> is carefully noted in the introduction and in 3.1, this is totally 
> missing. Either it should be added in these sections, or it should be 
> added in PRECIS itself.
PRECIS simply re-uses the CONTEXTJ and CONTEXTO rules from IDNA. This  
mentioned in various sections of the precis-framework spec (just search 
for "contextj" within the document), but is not specifically called out 
early in the spec. Would that be useful?

Peter