[arabic-vip] FW: Arabic Public Comments

[Behnam Esfahbod]

Dear Sarmad, all,

I'm not sure if I can attend the conf-call. Yet my response to the public
comments follows:

== Nov 13, by Taarki B. Merghani from Sudan - ISOC ==

As noted before, this comment is addressing Arabic-language users. We all
know that ZWNJ is not used in Arabic language, as well as many other
characters like PEH, ZHEH, GAF, and CHEH. No IDN TLD that wishes to target
Arabic-language users is enforced to use ZWNJ, as they are not enforced to
use PEH, etc.

== Nov 15, by Abdulrahman Al Marzouqi ==

Re: COMMENT #1 - ZWNJ
The previous reason persist here as well.

Re: Item I.
IDNA2008 ContextJ rule for ZWNJ makes sure that ZWNJ is "visible" at all
time.

About ZWNJ being "clear", we understand that there are some fonts that have
problems in some specific cases, which is why we have made a recommendation
about those cases. Of course a damaged font can cause security risks for
all users and for all the scripts, and is not specific to Arabic script or
ZWNJ character.

Re: Item II.
Again, noone is expecting Arabic-language users to type ZWNJ, as noone
expects them to type PEH, ZHEH, etc.

About the number of key-presses for ZWNJ, I don't think that can be a
considered as a measure at all. Character ZHEH is entered in Iranian
Persian keyboard using Shift+C and ZWNJ is entered using either Shift+B or
Shift+Space. If someone wants to make any conclusion, that would be ZWNJ is
more important than letter ZHEH.

In fact, in my study on some two Persian text corpora (one on traditional
content, and the other one Persian Wikipedia), I showed that ZWNJ is in
fact used more than some letters, including letter ZHEH.

Re: Item III.
Completely INVALID claim. IDNA2008 rule makes sure that there exists Arabic
"letters" before and after any ZWNJ character, and if you read UBA (Unicode
Bidirectional Algorithm) you will realize that ZWNJ in IDNs will not raise
any bidi issue.

Actually, such a comment should be sent to IDNA WG and not VIP
Arabic-Script team.

Re: Item IV.
For Arabic-language users, yes, it might. But for Persian, Urdu, Kurdish
(and other language that require ZWNJ) users it would not. Again, for
Arabic-language users, GAF can be treated as KAF, or PEH can be treated as
BEH or YEH. In fact, with very small font sizes, YEH can be treated as BEH,
and both of them are used in Arabic language.

Re: COMMENT #2 - Interchangeable Case

Again, if you think we should put "ALEF WITH MADDA ABOVE" and "ALEF" in the
same group, then we should put BEH, YEH, and PEH in the same group, and
soon we will have only 12 groups and possible "variation" groups consisting
thousands of domain names. It just doesn't work that way, we cannot
"completely" secure the whole domain name space by just creating huge
variation groups.


Best,
-Behnam


-- 
    '     بهنام اسفهبد
    '     Behnam Esfahbod
   '      http://behnam.esfahbod.info
  *  ..   Persian Internet Society
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