[arabic-vip] ZWNJ (earlier: [vip] Overarching principles used in Devanagari team report)

[Raed Al-Fayez]

Dear All,

I just want to clear myself more regarding my last email:

1-      I am not saying that any code point that are not part of the Arabic language should not be supported!!! In my email when I raised that "the ZWNJ is not used/known in the Arabic language" because I have seen many emails pointing that the Arabic language use it (or know it) and that allowing them will not affect its users! I still believe that most of the Arab users (including me) don't know how to type it so I can fairly say that we don't know it and we don't know how to type it with all respect to other languages.

2-      Also when I raised the issue for the space was not to break the Internet and change everything! I was trying to open our mind that it is possible for many writing systems to find workaround for some of the issues that they may face. Yes it will be better to allow something before it will be blocked but again if it will not confuse or add a risk to the end users.

3-      BTW we have requested to use the space in domain names when that is possible but due to technical/historical design of the DNS protocol that will not be possible (see this RFC5564).

4-      Again I want to emphasize that I respect all the languages on the Internet but I don’t respect that someone take the voice of others without asking them!!! I have not heard consensus about ZWNJ in the face-to-face meeting and from the emails following the meeting I see the opposite direction.

5-      Generally, I believe that the root should be more conservative especially when something touch the security of the Internet.

I want to also clarify that EN numbers, Dot, Hyphen and other control characters (e.g. ZWJ, ZWNJ..etc) are not part of the Arabic Script master table and/or its presentation forms as listed in Unicode Middle Eastern Scripts (0600-06FF, 0750-077F,0F50-0DFF, FE70-FEFF). Yes they are code points that can be used in domain names and for this reason I suggest separating them in a section at the end of the report indicating our position on each one of them.

With best regards,

Raed I. Al-Fayez
------------------------------------------
Senior IT Projects Specialist, M.Sc, PMP
Saudi Network Information Center (SaudiNIC)
Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC)
Tel: + 966-1-2639235   - Fax: + 966-1-2639393
http://www.nic.net.sa<http://www.nic.net.sa/>

From: behnam at gmail.com [mailto:behnam at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Behnam Esfahbod
Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 4:22 AM
To: Raed Al-Fayez
Cc: Fahd Batayneh; Manal Ismail; Arabic VIP
Subject: Re: [arabic-vip] ZWNJ (earlier: [vip] Overarching principles used in Devanagari team report)

Dear Raed,

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 7:09 AM, Raed Al-Fayez <rfayez at citc.gov.sa<mailto:rfayez at citc.gov.sa>> wrote:
I want to add to Manal points that we (as an Arabic language community) don't know/use the ZWJ & ZWNJ ( we can't type them using our keyboards even if they are enabled).
I think we agreed on excluding ZWJ already.

As for ZWNJ, I know that it is not used in Arabic language. But that shouldn't mean that it shouldn't be used. Clearly there are a lot of characters in Unicode's Arabic script that are not used in Persian language.

As for typing them using keyboard, you can do that indeed. In Windows 7, activate the "Arabic (Saudi Arabia)" keyboard and try Ctrl+Shift+2. This is the same method people should type in using Microsoft's Persian keyboard layout, which means that a Persian-speaking use can actually type ZWNJ using the Arabic keyboard!

Personally I feel that these two control points can add serious risk to the internet users.
More details please?

BTW we as Arabic language users use the space to separate words however it is blocked form domain names and we are forced to use the Hyphen (-) as a word separator even that it is not the best option but we some kind understand the reasons for not enabling it. And I believe the number of languages in the internet that is affected from blocking the space is very large.
So I think if the group is going to support ZWNJ and/or ZWJ in TLDs(because it may be needed by other languages) then we should also ask to support/reconsider the support of the space in TLDs and even more in all Internet Standards (IDNA RFC, DOMAIN RFC ..etc). Also if the group is going to support them in the TLD then we should add a warning that they  may cause  a risk and ICANN should study this topic carefully.
Space is used in Persian language (and AFAIK all of Arabic-script-based languages) very similar to how they are used in Arabic language. Did anyone ask for allowing Space in TLDs here? I don't think so.

If it is going to be simply excluding a character because it's not used in one language, we would end up with a few (maybe less than 20) letters, which would make the TLDs broken for all the languages in this group.

I think this approach doesn't not help the team to reach any consensus. We are supposed to respect the fact that Arabic script has been developed and evolved during centuries in various geolocations by different group of people and the each of these groups has made changes to the script to adapt it to their needs. The fact that Unicode standard calls it "Arabic script" is only because "Arabic language" has the majority in using this script, and whether some character is used in Arabic language or not cannot be considered a measure in governing the issues regarding this script.

Best regards,
-Behnam

--
    '     بهنام اسفهبد
    '     Behnam Esfahbod
   '      http://behnam.esfahbod.info
  *  ..   http://zwnj.org/
 *  `  *  http://persian-computing.ir
  * o *   3E7F B4B6 6F4C A8AB 9BB9 7520 5701 CA40 259E 0F8B

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