I have been selected as the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART)
reviewer for this draft (for background on Gen-ART, please see
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html ).
Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments
you may receive.
Document: draft-ietf-idnabis-bidi-06.txt
Right-to-left scripts for IDNA
Reviewer: Joel M. Halpern
Review Date: 5-Oct-2009
IETF LC End Date: 14-Oct-2009
IESG Telechat date: N/A
Summary: This document is nearly ready for publication as a proposed
standard.
There is one comment I have marked as Major. I presume that the actual
problem is not a defect in the intent of the spec, but a defect in this
readers understanding. Presuming such, I would ask that clarifying text
be added.
Major issues:
In section 2, when describing the rules for what is allowed in labels,
CS is allowed in labels. It is not allowed to start RTL labels. This
looks fine, until I realized that CS includes ".", which I am pretty
sure is not allowed in a label.
This gets further complicated in section 3, when talking about "The
Character Trouping requirement", the text talks about "Delimiterchars"
being CS, WS, or ON. A parenthetical then says "They are not allowed in
domain labels."
Since the normative text said that CS is allowed, there seems to be a
problem.
Minor issues:
Rule 6 in section 2 talks about the requirements on the termination of
an LTR (left-to-right) label. This requirement is much tighter than
just "don't end with an RTL character", since rule 5 already said "don't
use any RTL characters."
However, the non-normative introductory text says roughly that this
document does not put constraints on labels which do not use RTL characters.
My guess, as a person who is neither a DNS expert nor a Unicode expert,
is that rules 6 is not a new rule.
If rule 6 is equivalent to existing rules in other documents, shouldn't
there be an explanation of the fact that it is a restatement of existing
rules? If it is not just a restatement, then how can you get away with
it in this document?
At the end of section 2, there is a reference to LDH-labels. That is
the only occurrence of the string LDH in the document. I presume it is
a typo for something?
Nits/editorial comments:
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