[arabic-vip] [vip] Overarching principles used in Devanagari team report

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 08:42:17AM -0400, Behnam Esfahbod wrote:
> About the "New gTLDs" program, I cannot see how such a decision could
> be finalized whilst the IDN VIP teams have not handed over their
> reports. If I
> recall correctly, we discussed this in our very first couple of
> conf-calls and Baher informed us that ICANN expects to finalize the
> script-specific issues of the New gTLDs program after IDN VIP
> completes its tasks.

As usual, I don't speak for ICANN.

My impression is that the guidebook that was published on 19 Sept is
supposed to be final.  It contains the following text in Module 2,
Part II: "The general category of all codepoints, as defined by IDNA,
must be one of (Ll, Lo, Lm, Mn)."  This may be an issue the team wants
to raise in its report.

> And about draft-liman-tld-names. First, it's an Internet-Draft, and
> not even an RFC, and (as you know better than us) by definition "It is
> inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite
> them other than as "work in progress."".

Well, yes.  Note, however, that as things stand there is an argument
available to be made that any IDN in the root zone is in violation of
RFC 1123, section 2.1 (and some people are in fact making that
argument).  If that argument were to prevail, it would mean that no
IDN TLD would be allowed, period, and the existing delegations would
appear to be a violation of the IANA operator contract between ICANN
and NTIA/DoC.  For my part, I'd like to avoid setting the fuse on that
bomb.

> Second, as far as I understood from the f2f meeting of the APPWG at
> last IETF meeting, the majority of the APPWG agreed that rules 4.2 and
> 4.3 are not necessary (and are in fact policy issues, not technical
> ones) and draft-liman-tld-names, in terms of selecting the characters,
> should follow IDNA2008.

I think there was a lot of disagreement, and I certainly wouldn't say
that the majority came down one way or another.  Moreover, what one
hears at the mic is not always a good guage for consensus, since the
mic is the place where people who _disagree_ usually show up.

> I suppose the Devangari team should consider these points and remove
> statement 1.4 (on digits, ZWJ and ZWNJ) from the list of postulates to
> the list of their recommendations for the respective script.

Their recommendations are from their perspective, but if this team
disagrees with them this team is of course in a position to adopt
other fundamental principles.

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com