Re: Moving the IDN RFCs from Proposed to Draft Standards

Paul,

I have delayed writing this note in the hope that someone else 
would take the lead -- I'm tired of being the bad guy with 
regard to IDNA, which I basically support.  But a number of 
conversations during the last week have convinced me that it is 
important that something be said, so, two issues:

(1) It was my understanding of the agreements when the IDN 
documents were approved that, when they went to Draft, the Draft 
versions would incorporate a better statement of applicability 
and scope than the original versions and, in particular, would 
incorporate the gist of the "IESG Statement" on IDN 
applicability and missing pieces.   That agreement does not 
appear to be reflected in the text of the new drafts.

(2) Efforts to deploy IDNs seem to be hitting some user problems 
as those users see more of punycode then makes them happy.  Of 
course, for many end users, seeing punycode at all, ever, is too 
much.  Since the purpose of IDNA is to deliver native-text 
characters to end user applications and the presentation to the 
user, there is a case to be made that the "interoperable 
implementations" condition needs to be demonstrated with actual, 
end-user-oriented, applications that deliver non-ASCII 
characters to users.  That is, interoperability between test 
environments that can demonstrate the ability to prepare, code, 
and decode strings is not sufficient to demonstrate that 
interoperable and conforming implementations are possible.  I 
can't tell from the IDNConnect "final report" whether that 
stronger condition was met by those programs but, if it was not, 
some serious community discussion on this issue is probably in 
order.

regards,
     john



--On Thursday, 09 October, 2003 13:21 -0700 "Paul Hoffman / IMC" 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Greetings again. Patrik, Adam, Marc and I have made editorial
> revisions to the RFCs in a new series of Internet drafts. The
> announcements for those drafts came out recently; the
> following four messages include a summary of the announcements
> plus the list from each Internet Draft about what changes it
> makes to the corresponding RFC. Note that none of the
> protocols were changed: all the document changes were for
> clarification based on comments we have received over the past
> six months, plus a few minor editorial changes. That is, an
> implementation of the old RFC should work the same under the
> new RFC.
>
> Comments on the individual drafts are appreciated.
>
> BTW, the second part of moving RFCs from Proposed to Draft
> Standard involves finding two or more independent
> interoperable implementations of the standard. We believe that
> we found many during the IDNConnect event (see
> <http://www.idnconnect.jdna.jp>) a few weeks ago, and we'll be
> making a full report on this soon.
>
> --Paul Hoffman, Director
> --Internet Mail Consortium
>