[UA-discuss] Technical Constraints to UA & EIA success

Andrew Sullivan ajs at anvilwalrusden.com
Tue Jun 26 12:55:58 UTC 2018


On Tue, Jun 26, 2018 at 07:17:51AM +0000, Don Hollander wrote:
> There are some issues around IDNA and Unicode versions.   (How far did PRECIS
> go do addressing these?)  

PRECIS did nothing about them, because it wasn't chartered to work on
IDNA.

The problem there is really a gap between UTC's approach to code
points and what IDNABIS thought it was getting from Unicode.  This
appears to be an unbridgeable gap, but it's not really a technical
problem: it's a political problem of different SDOs working in the
same space.  The cases that are at issue, however, are so abstruse as
not to be serious effective barriers right now anyway.

> So, what do you think are the remaining technical constraints to acceptance of
> all domain names and all email addresses?

I think the goal is unreasonable, because _all_ domain names and email
addresses have never been accepted anywhere.  Blacklists and
blocklists have been the reality on the Internet since before ICANN
even existed, because people and enterprises have always wanted to get
their work done without connecting to everything.  But if you mean
_general_ acceptance of all domain names and all email addresses, the
piece still missing are effective policy engines that can be used in
clients, so that they can handle names that the user can't really use
(i.e. domains in a writing system the user can't read or otherwise
parse).  This is, in some sense, the difference between an
_identifier_ and a usable name, and it's a vexing problem.  Every
culture has a story like the bliblical Babel narrative, and it's not
for nothing!  This may not be a technology we can invent.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com


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